


The Higher Soldiership 

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The Higher Soldiership 


BY 

CHARLES E. BEALS 

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PUBLISHED BY 

The Chicago Peace Society 

30 NORTH LASALLE STREET 

CHICAGO 


3K nfi>3 



Copyright, 1912 


Charles E. Beals 


Printed by 
Ernest Morehouse 
711 So. Dearborn Street 
Chicago 



gCI.A309953 

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“The higher soldiership of the higher battles/’— Phillips 
Brooks. 

“War a good warfare.”—i Tim. I :i8. 

“Endure hardness as a good soldier.”—2 Tim. 2:3. 

“Whose I am and whom I serve.”— Acts 27:23. 

“I was ever a fighter.” —Robert Browning. 

“Isn’t it jolly to be a mounted soldier in the service of the 
Lord?”— General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. 

“Jolly good fun.”— Dr. W. T. Grenfell. 

“Servant of God, well done; well hast thou fought 
The better fight.”— Milton. 


CONTENTS 


Page 


INTRODUCTION—THE PROBLEM. 7 

1. Religion too warlike and not warlike enough . . 7 

2. Two things desirable ....... 8 

3. Harnessing the war giant ...... 8 

I— THE WAR HABIT.io 

1. Man a fighter . . . . . . . . io 

2. The danger of the war habit breaking out in war . n 

3. The fallacy of gun philosophy . . . . .11 

II— A WORTHY SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR NEEDED . 16 

1. Internationalism already begun . . . . .16 

2. War enginery an anachronism to-day . . .17 

3. Wanted—a substitute for war and a useful outlet for the 

war spirit .... ... 18 

4. Loyalty the all-inclusive soldier virtue . . .19 

III— SOME SUGGESTED SUBSTITUTES FOR WAR . . 20 

1. Industrialism suggested by Carlyle and Ruskin . . 20 

2. Miss Addams’s more comprehensive suggestion . . 21 

3. Religion the worthiest substitute for war and the best 

outlet for the war spirit . . . . .21 


IV— THE IDEA OF A HIGHER SOLDIERSHIP IN HAR¬ 

MONY WITH HUMAN EXPERIENCE . . 22 

1. The idea an old one ....... 22 

2. The idea understood by all . . . . . .30 

3. The martial note in great hymns . . . .30 

4. Biography and the military type . . . . .32 

5. Religion set forth in terms of personal relation . . 35 

6. Soldierly religion in harmony with the spirit of the times 35 

7. Organized evil makes necessary a militant and organized 

righteousness ........ 37 

8. The soldier’s life full of useful and stimulating illustra¬ 

tions .38 

9. The demand for heroes perpetual . . . .40 

10. Certain great movements prophetic of a substitution of 

religion for war ....... 42 

11. The higher soldiership in poetry . . . . .47 

12. The prophecy of science ...... 50 

V— FIGHTING LIKE A GOD.54 

1. The new soldiery ........ 54 

2. The good fight.55 






The Higher Soldiership 


“Fight the good fight.”—I Tim. 6:12. 

INTRODUCTION—THE PROBLEM. 

Given a universe in which the chief activities of man (the 
highest creature and the highest known product of the cosmic 
process) seem to be summed up in war-preparedness, Prob¬ 
lem —to find whether such a universe is rational and moral, or 
irrational and immoral, or non-moral; and, if said universe is 
proved or assumed to be rational and moral, then to account for 
the evolution of the war system, or to discover some higher 
warfare to which the present war system shall be but a prelude 
and for which the present war habit shall be but a preparation. 

1. Religion too warlike and not warlike enough. 

Religion is too warlike and religion is not warlike enough. 
Up to the present, the most noticeable product of evolution is a 
group of some half hundred nationalities, bankrupting them¬ 
selves for the maintenance of rival man-killing establishments. 
If this were to be the ultimate goal of cosmic activities, better 
that creation never had occurred than that its grist should be a 
race of scientific fratricides. 

Strange to tell, alongside, or in the very heart, of these 
mail-clad nationalities, religions flourish. The war system could 
exist not for one day without the sufferance of religious people. 
Obviously, religion is too warlike, too fond, or too tolerant, of 
the man-killing business. From Constantine’s day down to the 
Peace of Westphalia, the bitterest, longest and most devastating 
wars of all the centuries were religious wars. The Christian 
church never hesitated to buckle on sword and spurs for a 
dogma or for the extension of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Relig¬ 
ious wars, happily, are now a thing of the past. But even now 
religion is called upon to bless the colors of regiments marching 
forth to kill, and called on to offer patriotic prayers for victory 
when once the fray is on. Instead of jealously exercising its 
function as peacemaker, and seeking the realization of the 


7 


peacemaker’s beatitude proclaimed by the “Prince of Peace,” 
religion even now is too warlike, too willing to sanction man¬ 
killing, too ready to slay. 

On the other hand, religion is not warlike enough. It is 
too unwilling to exercise the second soldier function, namely, 
being wounded or killed. One great religion—Christianity—has 
for its symbol the death emblem—a cross. But how much of 
the martyr spirit is found in its professors? Is not ethical 
invertebrateness too characteristic of the institutional and indi¬ 
vidual religion of to-day? Do the people who talk most about 
the cross best incarnate and exemplify the spirit of Calvary’s 
middle cross? Religion, in this sense, we repeat, is too unwar¬ 
like. Of unbloody militancy there is an almost universal lack. 
Of an unkilling ready-to-dieness there is altogether too little. 

2. Two things desirable. 

The world would be a far more comfortable home for man, 
and human progress would be incalculably accelerated, if two 
things could be done; namely, first, if the present over-pressure 
of war spirit which prevails throughout the entire world could 
be relieved without blood-letting; and, secondly, if religion could 
be toned up in ethical loyalty and heroic self-devotedness by an 
infusion of the soldier spirit and soldier virtues into the lives of 
the professedly religious. Both of these desirable results, I 
believe, can be attained by the spiritualizing of war. 

Please note that I do not say that men should stop strug¬ 
gling. Struggle is the price of progress. Mr. Darwin ranks 
struggle for life as the supreme factor in evolution. 1 To stop 
struggling is to stop growing. It would indeed be a pity to lose 
the “fighting edge.” 2 

3. Harnessing the War Giant. 

“How the Giant Was Caught and Set to Work” was the 
title of a story in the reading-books of a generation ago. 3 The 
story was an account of Benjamin Franklin’s experiment with 
the kite, and the subsequent harnessing of electricity to do use¬ 
ful work in the world. Thus a force which, unharnessed, was 
dangerous and dreadful, became, when put to work, a tireless, 
faithful, wonder-working servant of man. Wanted—a new 
Franklin to harness the modern war giant, which, Colossus-like, 

1 Drummond: Evolution of Man, 166, 169. 

2 Theodore Roosevelt. 

8 By T. S. Arthur; see Monroe’s Fifth Reader, 169. 


8 


bestrides two hemispheres, swallows down the world’s resources, 
and, like Jove, threatens to let fly his fateful lightnings without 
a moment’s warning. 

Dr. David Jayne Hill, in the closing paragraph of his 
admirable little volume, World Organisation and the Modern 
State , tells us that “if we may estimate the future by the trans¬ 
formations of the last three hundred years, we may reasonably 
entertain the hope that the energies of mankind may be more 
and more diverted from plans and preparations for mutual 
destruction, and devoted to united helpfulness in overcoming 
vice, misery, disease and ignorance—the common enemies of 
mankind.” 4 If this be true then certainly the time now has come 
for us to spiritualize our fighting. 

Admitting that all sorts of blessings, perhaps, may have come 
from war, yet not forgetting all the ills that these blessings have 
cost, is not the waging of a higher kind of warfare the best use 
we can make of the war spirit? Is it not possible for rational, 
moral beings to transform war from a physical strife, from a 
wasteful, cruel struggle, into a moral, constructive, altruistic, noble 
and ennobling warfare? From gory, unbrotherly, brute strife, 
which perhaps may be legitimate for wild beasts and jungle men, 
civilized nations should now turn to struggles worthy of ethical, 
socialized men, worthy of our times, our knowledge, our moral 
outlook. Fight on, ever fight, but, henceforth, “fight the good 
fight.” This is the world’s chief task and opportunity just now, 
—to gather up all the warrior spirit which has been generated 
through the cumulative inheritance from unnumbered generations 
of fighting ancestors, and to provide a bloodless outlet for the 
war spirit by applying it to the living of a truly religious life; 
or, adhering to the figure of the giant, to harness the burly war 
giant to serve man’s highest needs. Thus, like a spring freshet 
which has been harnessed to do useful work, the war instinct 
may be turned to good advantage if exercised in a new direction, 
that is to say, if harnessed to fighting evil instead of to the kill¬ 
ing of fellow humans. In the future, the gun man will rank 
with the hangman of former days, or, at best, no higher than 
the policeman. The real fighting will be done by men of the 
spirit of Heine, “a soldier in the liberation war of humanity.” 5 
The battle will consist not in blood shedding, but in overcoming 

4 Hill: World Organization and the Modern State, 201. 

6 Spargo: Karl Marx, 78. 


9 


all sorts of evils with a religion energized with a new strenuous¬ 
ness, a religion daringly ethical, a religion undyingly loyal and 
chivalrously self-sacrificing. This is the dream, the two-fold 
object of our study, to drain off the war spirit into soldierly 
religious living. 

And now let us consider our task a little more in detail, in 
order that we may underrate neither its magnitude nor its dif¬ 
ficulty. 

I—THE WAR HABIT. 

i. Man a fighter. 

If we may believe genial “Bob” Burdette, men are “the 
fightingest things in the world.” 6 But we must remember that 
it is because man is a good fighter that he is here at all. Had 
he not been, he would have fallen prey to a thousand foes. He 
had to fight to live. He was forced to fight with animals larger 
and stronger than himself. Nor were his foes solely non-human. 
Man fought man, tribe battled against tribe, for food and pas¬ 
turage, for women, for the capture or defense of children, for 
the love of excitement, for the sheer joy of triumphing? 7 

In time nations were evolved, and nation became pitted 
against nation. Since Napoleon over-ran Europe, immense 
armies have been maintained even in times of peace. Of late in 
both hemispheres there has been going on a desperate race in 
rival naval arming. Dreadnanghts and super-Dreadnaughts have 
been multiplied in a frenzy of self-preservation which is utterly 
reckless of the economic future. Never before has the world 
seen such a spectacle of military and naval paraphernalia as the 
nations maintain to-day. The British Prime Minister estimates 
that the “civilized” nations are expending between two and two 
and one-half billions of dollars annually for war purposes. 8 The 
United States, during its existence as a nation, has devoted over 
seventeen billions of dollars to war, as over against five billions 
to all other purposes. 9 And a former chairman of the Commit¬ 
tee on Appropriations of our national House of Representatives 
told us, not long ago, that the United States even now is paying 

fi Proceedings of the Second National Peace Congress, Chicago, 1909, 58. 

7 Compare William James: The Moral Equivalent of War, 4; Pamphlet No. 
27, published by the Association for International Conciliation. 

^Report of XVII Universal Peace Congress, London, 1908, 210. 

8 Report of the Massachusetts Commission on the High Cost of Living. 


10 


72% of its revenues for wars past or possible. 10 In an economic 
age like ours, when we are more and more coming to think of 
non-productive spending as immoral, the very fact that such 
appropriations of the people’s money can be secured for war pur¬ 
poses, only goes to show how strong is the fighting instinct which 
we have inherited. 

2. The danger of the war spirit breaking out in war . 

Nor is the economic menace the only one. History shows 
that it is the military nations which have been embroiled in wars. 
For history reveals the fallacy of the maxim, “In time of peace 
prepare for war,” which, Dr. Hale used to say, did not originate 
with George Washington but with an “old hog” (the boar in 
Aesop’s fable). Certainly war preparations breed national fears, 
suspicions, jealousies. Queen Alexandra said a few years ago, 
“I have always mistrusted warlike preparations of which nations 
never seem to tire. Some day this accumulated material . . . 
will burst into flames.” 11 And Mr. Asquith has uttered equally 
solemn words: “These things are intended to be used. They 
... do not exist for ornament and display. ... At some 
moment, by the sudden outburst . . . of an accidental fit of 
passion or temper, they will be let loose upon the world.” 12 
Herein lies the danger, and herein also consists the desirability 
of draining off some of the existing war spirit through some 
unbloody channel, in order to relieve the pressure which has now 
reached the danger point. 

3. The fallacy of gun philosophy. 

So firmly has the war habit fastened itself upon the race, 
that we often are assured by some of our ablest thinkers that 
the cessation of war is both impossible and undesirable. Jere¬ 
miah Mason, the eminent New England lawyer of a former gen¬ 
eration, once wrote to Charles Sumner: “An Anti-War Society 
is as little practicable as an Anti-Thunder and Lightning Soci¬ 
ety.” 13 

Many minor arguments are advanced in favor of war. 
Some of our sociologists are so ready to point out that war is a 
blessing because it mixes the races, sharpens the wits, breaks up 
the crust of custom and spreads the ideas of civilization, that 

10 Congressional Record, June 14 1909, Speech of Hon. James A. Tawney. 

11 Advocate of Peace, 1905, 99. 

12 Report of XVII Universal Peace Congress, London, 1908, 210. 

13 Summer: Addresses on War, 142. 


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they almost appear as advocates of war. 14 Granting that all this 
may have been done by war, and that without war primitive 
peoples could not have been brought to take the steps necessary 
for progress; granting that war was useful once, in earlier and 
lower stages of human development; the question for us is, 
whether it is useful and necessary any longer. 15 We have entered 
upon a new day in world life. As Colonel Higginson says: 
“Now the pursuits of peace are recognized as the real, and war 
as the accidental.” 16 In this age of ocean cables and wireless 
telegraphy, quick steamboats, railroads, immigration and news¬ 
papers, we no longer need war to mix the peoples. Dr. Hirsch 
pertinently asks: “Is it necessary to-day that armies shall meet 
in order that the man from the West shall touch elbows with 
the man from the East? Is it necessary in these days that fleets 
shall sail out and meet with hostile intent upon the high seas 
when the peaceful wonder-palaces that are afloat plow the ocean 
and bring the greeting of the rising sun to the lands lying under 
the sun's western good-night kiss? I ask, is it necessary that 
navies shall go and speak of the power and the might and the 
civilization of a nation in these days when the public prints have 
made it unnecessary, and when wireless telegraphy carries across 
the distance the news of the busy toil and the power and 
strength of the nation? ... In these days war for the purpose 
of bringing men together is antiquated. We have discovered 
other means of building bridges across the sea and passages over 
the dividing mountains.” 17 

Then there is the plea that war is necessary for justice. This 
argument is well formulated in the words with which Rudolph 
von Ihering commences his famous book which was published in 
German in 1872 and since has been translated into foreign lan¬ 
guages twenty-one times: “The end of justice is peace, the 
means for attaining it is conflict. So long as justice is attacked 
by injustice, ... so long will justice not be exempt from con¬ 
flict. . . . All the justice in the world has been obtained by 
struggle; every important rule of right has had to be wrung 
from those who have opposed it; and every right, that of a peo¬ 
ple as well as that of an individual, presupposes the constant 

ld Comp. Ward: Pure Sociology, 235-238; Tenks: History of Politics, 79; Mor¬ 
ns: Popular Science Monthly, XLVII, 826-831; all quo. in Ross: Social Psy¬ 
chology, 245-250. 

1B Comp. Report of Second Universal Peace Congress, London, 1890 85 

“Col. T. W. Higginson: Atlantic Essays, Letter to Young Contributor, 90. 

x ‘Proceedings Second National Peace Congress, Chicago, 1909, 63 - 64 . 


12 


state of preparation to assert it.” 18 Now that there is a Hague 
court in operation, rendering satisfactory decisions, justice is 
more apt to be obtained by appealing to The Hague than by an 
appeal to arms. To refuse to submit a controversy to the court 
casts suspicion upon the justice of the case. Moreover, it is 
more probable that acts of international injustice will result from 
strongly armed nations appealing to force, than that equity will 
be vindicated. 

But the objection to the abolition of the war system is 
put forward to-day chiefly under two forms. The first is the 
biological. It is argued that war is the law of all life. Young 
Francis Parkman, on the Oregon Trail, one day wearies of study¬ 
ing the Ogillallah tongue, and throws himself down beside a deep, 
clear pool, in which a shoal of fishes, of about a pin’s length, are 
swimming. At first sight they appear to be sporting amicably. 
But let Parkman tell the story. “On closer observation,” he 
says, “I saw that they were engaged in cannibal warfare among 
themselves. Now and then one of the smallest would fall a vic¬ 
tim, and immediately disappear down the maw of his conqueror. 
. . . ‘Soft-hearted philanthropists,’ thought I, ‘may sigh long 
for their peaceful millennium; for, from minnows to men, life is 
incessant war!’ ” 19 Not a few, to this day, hold this view as a 
working philosophy of life. Charles Richet, the famous French 
pacifist, thus justly presents the biological argument of the gun 
philosopher: “War is a biological phenomenon against which 
neither our wills nor our efforts have any power. There is a per¬ 
petual struggle going on among all living creatures; there must 
be, in the same way, a struggle among men. The theory of the 
necessity of war is a scientific theory, for war is the very law 
of life.” 20 In other words, since science shows that through all 
forms of physical life, from lowest to highest, incessant warfare 
is being waged, therefore it is inferred that “the basic principle 
of life is enmity.” 21 We are to consider, a little later in our 
study, what science has to say on this biological question. Suf¬ 
fice it to remark at this time, therefore, that later science has very 
very greatly modified the earlier doctrines of struggle for exist- 

18 Ihering: Der Kampf urns Recht, Vienna, 1906, quoted in Hill: World 
Organisation and Modern State, 151. 

18 Parkman: Oregon Trail, 270. 

20 Quo. in Richet: Peace arid War, pp. 60-61, translated from the French by 
Marian Edwards, and published by J. M. Dent & Co., 29-30 Bedford Street, 
London, 1906. 

21 Comp. Dr. William Hanna Thompson: The Nature of Physical Life, in 
Everybody’s Magasine, Dec., 1909, 832. 


13 


ence, and survival of the fittest. A single quotation from Prof. 
Shaler may be offered: “Whoever would mitigate the supreme 
evil of untimely death, whoever would give to this naturally glad 
world a chance to win its happiness, cannot do better service 
than to contend against war.” 22 No scientist, perhaps, has so 
unanswerably and eloquently refuted the crude pseudo-science 
of the gun philosophers as Starr Jordan in his delightful little 
volume, The Human Harvest. 

The other form that the gun philosopher’s plea takes is the 
moral. I do not refer to such mild arguments as that advanced 
by Dr. Paley, who devoted a chapter in his famous Moral Phi¬ 
losophy to “War and Military Establishments,” in which he jus¬ 
tified war. 23 But I mean the modern fallacy, which is advanced 
with almost religious fervor, that war is the very vital atmos¬ 
phere of moral virtue, and that if war ceased, altruism would 
die out. Machiavelli, of whom Macaulay said that “out of his 
surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his 
Christian name a synonym for the Devil,” 24 held that wars were 
necessary as a national tonic; peace . . . disruptive and ener¬ 
vating.” 25 In 1840, Sismondi argued that not only did nations 
deteriorate in times of peace, but that protracted peace meant 
the sure decay of the domestic virtues. 26 Professor Blackie, of 
Edinburgh, full of “red blood,” asked: “Was not every national 
war full of blazing virtues, before which the shopkeeper’s peace¬ 
ful virtues were apt to hide their diminished heads and burn 
very pale?” 27 John Ruskin’s Crown of Wild Olives, which Dr. 
Walter Walsh calls “the noblest of human pleas for the greatest 
of human follies,” 28 contains a lecture on “War,” which was 
delivered before the cadets in the Royal Military Academy at 
Woolwich in 1865. In this lamentable lecture, Ruskin glorified 
war, telling the young soldiers that art could flourish only in 
warlike nations; that agriculture, commerce, manufacture and the 
other peaceful occupations were fatal to art. 29 

In 1880, Von Moltke wrote to Prof. Bluntschli: “Eternal 
peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream; and war is a 
component part in the fixed order of the universe, established by 

22 Shaler: The Individual, 237. 

23 See Dymond on War, Grimke edition, 75 ff. 

^Macaulay: On Machiavelli, Crit., Hist, and Misc. Essays, I, 195. 

25 Cambridge Modern History, I, 205. 

2e Sismondi: Histoire des republiques italiennes, Paris, 1840, II, 172; quo. in 
Novicow; War and Its Alleged Benefits, 7-8. 

^See Stokes: British War History, 208-9, note. 

28 Walsh: Moral Damage of War, 41. 

M Ruskin: Crown of Wild Olives, 110. 


14 


God himself. It develops man’s noblest virtues of courage and 
renunciation, faithfulness to duty and readiness for sacrifice. 
Were it not for war, the world would become bemired in mate¬ 
rialism.” 30 This argument has been rolled like a sweet morsel 
under the tongue by militarists. In one form or another they 
never tire of reiterating that in no other way than by the battle 
and the march can valor, self-discipline and self-sacrifice be ade¬ 
quately developed. Whatever losses may be incurred are well 
worth such moral benefit. 31 Ernest Renan exhorted his con¬ 
temporaries not to give up war. “Let us cling with love to our 
custom of fighting from time to time, because war is the neces¬ 
sary occasion and place for manifesting moral force.” 32 G. Val- 
bert argues thus: “If the philanthropists were to succeed in 
suppressing war, they would, with the best intentions in the 
world, be rendering but a poor service to mankind. They would 
by no means be working for the ennoblement of our race. 
Unending peace would plunge the nations into dangerous leth¬ 
argy.” 33 Melchior de Vogue is even more emphatic: “The cer¬ 
tainty of peace . . . would, before the expiration of half a 
century, engender a state of corruption and decadence more 
destructive of men than the worst wars.” 34 Max Jahns sounds 
the same note: “War regenerates corrupted peoples, it awak¬ 
ens dormant nations, it rouses self-forgetful, self-abandoned races 
from their mortal languor. In all times war has been an essen¬ 
tial factor in civilization. It has exercised a happy influence 
upon customs, arts, and science.” 35 Thus the advocates of war 
regard it as “a cure by iron which strengthens humanity.” 38 

Some believers in this theory go so far as to base their 
philosophy of life on war. “Steinmetz is a good example. War, 
according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by God, who 
weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential form of the 
State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all 
their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible 
save as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which 
some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesive- 

80 Hill: World Organisation and the Modern State, 153; Comp. Trueblood*. 
Federation of the World, 4, note. 

\ ffl Comp. Shaler: The Individual, 232. 

“See Novicow: War and Its Alleged Benefits, 1-2. 

wRevue des deux Mondes, Apr. 1, 1894, p. 692; quo. in Novicow: War and 
Its Alleged Benefits, 48, 60, 65. 

84 Almanack de Hachette, 1894; see Novicow: War md Its Alleged Benefits, 48. 

“Jahns: Ueher Krieg, Frieden und Kultur, Berlin 1893; see Novicow, 1. 

“Quo. in Novicow, 65. 


15 


ness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, 
economy, wealth, physical health and vigor . . . there isn’t a 
moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn’t tell, when 
God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another. 
Die Weltgeschichte 1 st das Weltgericht ; and Dr. Steinmetz does 
not believe that in the long run chance and luck play any part in 
apportioning the issues.” 37 Thus Steinmetz is summed up by 
Prof. James. And Prof. Royce’s interpretation of the author 
of The Philosophy of War is similar: “According to him (Stein¬ 
metz), war gives an opportunity for loyal devotion so notable 
and important that, if war were altogether abolished, one of the 
greatest goods of civilization would thereby be hopelessly lost.” 38 
Perhaps gun philosophy reached the very height of the absurd 
in the unfortunate outburst of a German professor at the First 
Universal Races Congress in London in 1911. “Nations will 
come and nations will go,” he declared, “but racial and national 
antagonism will remain; and this is well, for mankind would 
become like a flock of sheep if we were to lose our national 
ambition and cease to look with pride and delight, not only on 
our industries and science, but also on our splendid soldiers and 
our glorious ironclads.” 39 Could inanity go beyond this? As if 
the cosmic processes existed to produce “splendid soldiers” and 
“glorious ironclads” as their final and finest product! Strange 
contradiction—that altruism can be developed only by killing! 

How shall we answer the militarist? Simply by saying 
that he proves too much. For, as Novicow reasons, “if war 
'gives men the opportunity to perform feats of heroism, self- 
denial and devotion,’ why not wage war between subjects of the 
same country? Civil war can develop all these virtues as well 
as international.” 40 Happily, in spite of all the arguments to 
the contrary, war is rapidly being consigned to the world’s scrap- 
pile of inefficient and out-grown institutions. 

II—A WORTHY SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR NEEDED. 

1. Internationalism already begun. 

The fact is, the world already has entered upon an era of 
internationalism. No one can read such an article as Judge 
Simeon E. Baldwin’s International Congresses and Conferences 

S7 William James: The Moral Equivalent of War. 

^Royce: Philosophy of Loyalty, 13. 

38 Spiller: Inter-racial Problems, 23. 

40 Novicow: War and Its Alleged Benefits, 81. 


16 


of the Last Century as Forces Working Toward the Solidarity 
of the World , 41 or such a book as Professor Reinsch’s Public 
International Unions, without perceiving that already we have 
begun to keep house co-operatively as a world. Since 1874, the 
nations of the world have supported and operated the Universal 
Postal Union. 42 Professor Reinsch tells us that there are some 
forty-five international enterprises or joint commissions now in 
operation, of which about thirty have permanent bureaus and 
publish regular bulletins. 43 Twenty-one nations officially sup¬ 
port and do business through the Pan-American Union. 44 In 
Central America a permanent High Court of Nations is in actual 
operation, the first of its kind in the history of the world. A 
periodic congress of nations, for a century the dream of peace¬ 
makers, is here in the shape of the Hague Conference. We 
have an International Court at The Hague, and soon shall have 
a better one. The poet’s dream has been realized and the daring 
vision is now a prose commonplace actuality, for the nations now 
meet “In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” 45 
And the same irresistible evolutionary forces which forced the 
American Colonies on from a loose federation to a real nation, 
will, in a similar way, carry forward the world from its present 
loosely federated organization to a unified, simplified, econom¬ 
ical, effective and universally just internationalism. We have 
gone so far that it is easy to discern in what direction we are 
moving. The world is moving away from war and towards 
rational, productive, efficient world-housekeeping. 

2. War enginery an anachronism to-day. 

War enginery is an anachronism in this day. In 
an interview with King Edward VII, of Great Britain, 
in March, 1910, Mr. Fairbanks, former Vice-President of the 
United States, said: “Wherever I have been I have seen ships 
building and troops drilling for war and yet I have seen no 
cause of war. The effects of this madness are visible in the 
squalor and distress of mankind. The theory that without war 
nations would become degenerate and that virility would go out 
of the masses is unworthy of any mind outside a madhouse. 
Degeneracy is coming about because the people are so oppressed 

41 American Journal of International Law, I, 567. 

42 American Journal of International Law, IV, 185-6. 

^Reinsch: Public International Unions, 4. 

44 Barrett: The Pan American Union. 

45 Tennyson: Locksley Hall, Poems, Cambridge edition, 93. 


17 


that they cannot be properly clothed, housed and fed.” 40 This is 
the situation: We live in an age of industrial, economic and scien¬ 
tific development; yet, with no causes for war existing in any part 
of the world, the nations are beggared for the support of war 
establishments. And not only is the world brought to the verge 
of bankruptcy by this policy, but the inflammability of all this 
war material is a perpetual menace to human welfare and prog¬ 
ress. To change the figure, practically the only cloud in the 
whole sky is this ominous war-cloud. To revert to our figure 
of the spring freshet: The only danger which threatens man¬ 
kind with an inundation of disaster and ruin is the abnormally 
swollen flood of war preparation. This flood of war thought and 
war talk and war practice must be drawn off through some use¬ 
ful, or at least harmless, channel before long, or it will overleap 
its due bounds and, sweeping away the safety embankments, 
carry devastation to all the peoples of the earth. How shall we 
set the war giant to work? He is the chief foe to the most 
progressive and best statesmanship of the world to-day. He is 
the heaviest incubus holding back world civilization. Not only 
is the world brought to the verge of bankruptcy to feed his 
insatiable appetite, but this pampered, surly bully threatens at 
any moment to break out in a fit of nasty temper and run amuck 
up and down the earth, smiting and smashing indiscriminatingly 
and universally whatever has been built up by organized civiliza¬ 
tion. As John Fiske pointed out, in his day: “Warfare, once 
regarded as the only fitting occupation for well-bred men, has 
come to be regarded not only as an intolerable nuisance, but even 
as a criminal business, save when justified on the ground of self- 
defence.” 47 

3. Wanteda substitute for war and a useful outlet for 
the war spirit. 

Over a hundred years ago Dr. Channing “felt that the time 
had come in Christendom when men’s struggles should not be 
like the struggles of the brutes, but struggles in the realm of 
ideas, with ideas themselves as the only respectable weapons.” 48 
What the world most needs, just at this particular point in its 
evolution, is a peaceful substitute for war and a useful outlet for 
the war spirit. As Professor William James pointed out, just 

48 Chicago Daily News, March 4th, 1910. 

47 Fiske: Excursions of an Evolutionist, 192. 

48 I£d\vin D. Mead: Introduction to Channing’s Discourses on War. XXVI. 


18 


before his lamented death, it is highly desirable to find “the moral 
equivalent of war.” We must remember, however, as David 
Jayne Hill reminds us, that “war, in spite of its terrible atroci¬ 
ties, has always appealed to strong and noble natures; and many 
of the most unselfish and useful men who have ever lived have 
been warriors. Calling as it does for sacrifice and heroism, con¬ 
flict seems to link the individual to some great cause that lies 
beyond the inconsequence of mere personal ease and selfish enjoy¬ 
ment, and places before him an object of existence beyond him¬ 
self.” 49 We must retain that which is good in the war system, 
namely, the martial virtues of strenuousness, loyalty, disinter¬ 
estedness, discipline and a high sense of honor. But we must 
find the “moral equivalent of war,” for the production and exer¬ 
cise of these virtues. Hitherto war has been the only school in 
which whole peoples could be trained in these virtues. But 
henceforth the same training should be attained by different 
means. We agree with Mr. H. G. Wells, in his First and Last 
Things, “that the conception of order and discipline, the tradi¬ 
tion of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exer¬ 
tion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty 
is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent 
acquisition, when the last ammunition has been used in the fire¬ 
works that celebrate the final peace.” 50 

4. Loyalty the all-inclusive soldier virtue. 

Now loyalty is the all-inclusive soldier virtue. You tell 
me that a man is brave, self-sacrificing, faithful in the petty 
details of daily routine, and you are only telling me that under 
all circumstances and in all situations the soldier is loyal. Loy¬ 
alty means all these things and all other things that go to make 
up his duty as a soldier. This is the prime soldier virtue. 

Would that men might learn this lesson of loyalty! How 
many problems would be solved or simplified, and how different 
human society would be, if all men were loyal to duty, loyal to 
their ideal, loyal to the best that is in them! Says Professor 
Royce: “Everybody has heard of loyalty; most prize it; but 
few perceive it to be what, in its inmost spirit, it really is—the 
heart of all the virtues, the central duty amongst all duties.” 51 
And Dr. Royce goes on to say: “Unless you can find some loy- 

40 Hill: World Organization and the Modern State, 152. 

^Wells: First and Last Things, 226. 

B1 Royce: The Philosophy of Loyalty, Preface, vii. 


19 


alty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living. You 
must find, then, a cause that is really worthy of the sort of devo¬ 
tion that the soldiers, rushing cheerfully to certain death, have 
felt for their clan or for their country, and that the martyrs have 
shown on behalf of their faith. This cause must be indeed 
rational, worthy, and no object of a false devotion. But once 
found, it must become your conscience, must tell you the truth 
about your duty, and must unify, as from without and from 
above, your motives, your special ideals and your plans.” 52 The 
same discerning thinker goes on to suggest that in building up 
men in loyalty, we must build on what we have; that is, we 
must take the cruder loyalty, such as we see in the soldier or 
college athlete, and bring it up to a higher level, or, in a word, 
spiritualize it. And Dr. Royce specifically says: “We unques¬ 
tionably need substitutes for military service as a means of train¬ 
ing for a loyal life. It belongs to our social leaders to invent 
and popularize such substitutes. Herein lies one of the great 
undertakings of the future.” 63 

Ill—SOME SUGGESTED SUBSTITUTES FOR WAR. 

i. Industrialism suggested by Carlyle and Ruskin. 

What shall be the substitute for war? Carlyle and Rus¬ 
kin suggested industrialism as a substitute for military strife. 
In his Unto This Last , Ruskin pleads for “Soldiers of the Plough¬ 
share as well as Soldiers of the Sword.” 54 In his Crown of 
Wild Olives occurs his famous passage: “Men are enlisted for 
the labour that kills—the labour of war; they are counted, 
trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let them be enlisted 
also for the labour that feeds: let them be counted, trained, fed, 
dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough exercises as care¬ 
fully as you do the sword exercises, and let the officers of troops 
of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops 
of death.” 55 Carlyle advocated the organization of the workers 
into regiments under intelligent leaders, just as at present sol¬ 
diers are organized. And he exclaimed: “No Working World, 
any more than a Fighting World, can be led on without a 
noble Chivalry of Work ... far nobler than any Chivalry of 
Fighting was.” 56 

B2 The same, 46-47. 

63 The same, 208. 

64 Ruskni: Unto This Last, 160. 

^Lecture on Work, in Ruskin: Crown of Wold Olives, 47-48. 

^Carlyle: Past and Present, Works VI, 476. 


20 


2. Miss Addams’s more comprehensive suggestion. 

But superior to the vague dreams of Ruskin and Carlyle, 
is the more practical and comprehensive suggestion of Miss 
Addams in her Newer Ideals of Peace. Miss Addams suggests 
not only industry as an outlet for the war spirit, but also poli¬ 
tics, social service and reform. One or two passages will show 
the line of her argument. “We care less each day for the hero¬ 
ism connected with warfare and destruction, and constantly 
admire more that which pertains to labor and the nourishing of 
human life. The new heroism manifests itself at the present 
moment in a universal determination to abolish poverty and dis¬ 
ease, a manifestation so widespread that it may justly be called 
international.” 57 “We may admire much that is admirable in 
this past life of courageous warfare, while at the same time we 
accord it no right to dominate the present, which has traveled 
out of its reach into a land of new desires.” 58 “The past may 
have been involved in war and suffering in order to bring forth 
a new and beneficent courage, an invincible ardor for conserv¬ 
ing and healing human life, for understanding and elaborating it. 
. . . The task that is really before us is first to see to it that the 
old virtues bequeathed by war are not retained after they have 
become a social deterrent, and that social progress is not checked 
by a certain contempt for human nature which is but the inher¬ 
ited result of conquest. Second, we must act upon the assump¬ 
tion that spontaneous and fraternal action as virile and wide¬ 
spread as war itself is the only method by which substitutes for 
war virtues may be discovered.” 59 So able and comprehensive 
is Miss Addams’s presentation of this thought of industrialism, 
politics, social service and reform as a substitute for war regi¬ 
ments that little is left to be said. 

3. Religion the worthiest substitute for war and the best 
outlet for the war spirit. 

In the present study the position will be taken that the 
best substitute for war that we can think of, and the most desir¬ 
able outlet for the war spirit, is religion. As Humboldt said: 
“The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is man.” 80 It may 
be added that the biggest, finest thing about man is his religion. 
The human soul is the goal of cosmic evolution, if we may 

67 Tane Addams: Newer Ideals of Peace, 24-25. 

68> The same, 211. 

BB The same, 212-213. 

e°See Wendell Phillips: Speeches, Lectures and Addresses, II, 349. 


21 


believe our scientists and philosophers. 61 What the universe is 
travailing to bring forth is moral goodness. But the most impor¬ 
tant force in making a man good is his religion. As Theodore 
Parker put it: “In character the most important element is the 
religious, for it is to be the guide and director of all the rest, 
the foundation-element of human excellence.” 62 And poetry 
agrees with science and philosophy. Take Walt Whitman’s 
words, for example: 

“I say that the real and permanent grandeur of These States 
must be their Religion; 

Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur; 

Nor character, nor life worthy the name, without Religion; 

Nor land, nor man or woman, without Religion.” 63 
Industry, politics and reforms are very important. But they are 
not so big nor so important as religion, even as the part is not 
equal to the whole. Religion embraces all the activities of man, 
wage-earning, producing, voting, creating standards and customs, 
and all other human activities. 

This, then, is the thought. The greatest aggregation of 
physical might which has been assembled by man is the war sys¬ 
tem. Inventions, improvements, scientific discovery, money, ma¬ 
chinery, men, organized system, all head up into the war estab¬ 
lishment. Man’s supreme physical and mental effort thus far 
seems to find its completest embodiment in battleships and dis¬ 
appearing coast rifles and the equipment of armies. It is fitting, 
then, that man’s supreme physical achievement should serve as a 
stepping-stone to religion, since religion is the biggest, finest and 
most spiritual attainment of man. And this can be accomplished 
by the spiritualization of war. If, as Mr. Emerson says, “crea¬ 
tion is on wheels, in transit, always passing into something else, 
streaming into something higher,” 64 how better can we use the 
war spirit than by harnessing it to the waging of a higher war¬ 
fare ? 

IV—THE IDEA OF A HIGHER SOLDIERSHIP IN HAR¬ 
MONY WITH HUMAN EXPERIENCE. 

i. The idea an old one. 

The conception of the religious life as a warfare is not new. 

61 Read, for example, John Fiske’s volumes. 

62 Theodore Parker: Works, Cobbe edition, II. 106. 

e3 Whitman: Starting from Paumanok, see Leaves of Gras s , 21. 

64 lCmerson: Poetry and Imagination, Works, VIII, 10. 


22 


Prof. Eucken tells us that to the Stoics existence was profoundly 
serious, and life was filled with toil and struggle. “The concep¬ 
tion of life as a conflict ( vivere est mtlitare) owes its origin 
particularly to this source, whence it has passed into the com¬ 
mon consciousness of mankind .” 65 Epictetus asked, “Do you not 
know that human life is a warfare? . . . Every man’s life is a 
kind of warfare. You must observe the duty of the soldier .” 66 
Marcus Aurelius declared, “life is a warfare .” 67 He describes 
the righteous man as “a priest and minister of the gods, . . . 
a fighter in the noblest fight, one who cannot be overpowered by 
any passion, dyed deep with justice .” 68 

Only within a few years have we known very much about 
Mithraism, the religion which was the most powerful competitor 
of Christianity in the early years of the Christian era . 69 “In 
the Avesta we find Mithra repeatedly invoked as a warlike and 
formidable deity, a god of battles, swift to assail and slay the 
enemies of truth and justice—which would normally mean, the 
enemies of his worshippers .” 70 We find an interesting bit of 
testimony to the warlikeness of Mithraism in the writings of 
one of the early Christian Fathers. Tertullian, in complaining 
that the “devil” imitates the divine mysteries, i. e., baptism and 
the Lord’s Supper, says: “Mithra sets his mark on the fore¬ 
head of his soldiers . . . and presents at once the crown and 
the sword .” 71 Though Mithraism eventually gave way before 
Christianity, nevertheless it left its mark upon the latter. “Some 
Mithraic items went but more remained. The Christian bishop 
. . . wore red military boots, now said to be 'emblematical of 
the spiritual warfare on which he had entered;’ in reality, doubt¬ 
less borrowed from the military worship of Mithra, dear to the 
first Christian emperor .” 72 

In Christian literature there is no figure which is so often 
used, all down through the centuries, as this idea that the Chris¬ 
tian is a soldier and the Christian life a warfare. Paul’s letters 
and other New Testament writings are full of military figures. 
In various passages, the apostle compares the Chris¬ 
tian life “to the. stringent and exact discipline of the military 

6B Eucken: Problem of Human Life, 89-90. 

66 Epictetus: Discourses, 162-3. 

67 Marcus Aurelius: Thoughts, 75, 103. 

e8 The same, 108. 

69 Harvard Theological Review, III, 195-200. 

70 Religious Systems of the World, 197. 

71 The same, 205. 

72 The same, 213. 


23 


service; the total separation of the soldier from his own private 
affairs, and the absolute subjection of his body and life to the 
.hardships of the camp, and the will of the commander. . . . 
Sometimes the particular point of comparison turns on the mat¬ 
ter of persistency; as in the resisting unto blood. Sometimes on 
the matter of courage; as when the righteous are declared to 
wax valiant in fight. Sometimes on the precision of stroke and 
parry in close combat with evil; as when one fights in a cavalry 
charge—not uncertainly, or as beating the air .” 73 

Says the author of The Arbiter in Council : “Tertullian, 
the first of the Latin Fathers whose writings have come down 
to us, was the son of a centurion. Many of his metaphors were 
drawn from camp life. . . . The Christians were ‘milites 

Christi.’ ” 74 Tertullian writes, exhorting Christians to be stead¬ 
fast under persecution: “Even in peace soldiers learn by labor 
and heavy tasks to endure war, since they are always under 
arms, perform their exercise in the open field, and dig trenches. 
Therefore, ye blessed ones, regard all your hardships as exercise 
for your powers of body .” 75 To quote Professor Eucken again: 
“The Occidental Christians were fond of calling themselves ‘sol¬ 
diers of God’; and of the thinkers Cyprian in particular delighted 
in metaphors drawn from military affairs and the lives of sol¬ 
diers .” 70 Mosheim tells us concerning the Christian life in the 
second century: “Those who obtained admission to the King¬ 
dom of Christ . . . like newly enlisted soldiers, swore to obey 
their commander .” 77 A most significant passage is found in the 
sixth book of the Divine Institutes of Lactantius, who was some¬ 
times styled “The Christian Cicero”: “The righteous man may 
not be a soldier, for righteousness itself is his soldiership .” 78 
Here we have the very thought which we are trying to present 
in this study. Neander alludes to the “favorite comparison 
among the early Christians between their vocation and a mili¬ 
tary service (militia).” Again he says: “The Christians . . . 
were fond of comparing their calling to a military warfare, a 
militia Christi .” 79 And in another of his works, the same his¬ 
torian writes: “As the whole life of the Christian is a conflict 

73 Bushnell: Sermons on Living Subjects, 397. 

74 Hirst: The Arbiter in Council, 530. 

7B See Brain: The Morning Watch, 354. 

78 Eucken: Problem of Human Life, 184. 

77 Mosheim: Church History, I, 134. 

78 See Hirst: The Arbiter in Council, 530. 

70 Neander: Church History, I, 425, 409. 


24 


with the world and the powers of darkness, a conflict within and 
without, the kingdom of God in this world must appear as mili¬ 
tant, and must make its way by conflict; so that often in the 
Holy Writ the calling of the Christian is compared to that of 
military life, and the Christian is represented as the soldier of 
his Lord. This image was very clear and familiar to the first 
Christians. . . . To this the beautiful words refer in the epistle 
of Ignatius to Polycarp: ‘Strive to please him in whose service 
you are fighting, for from him you will receive the pay. Let 
none of you prove deserters/ Augustine frequently makes beau¬ 
tiful use of the same comparison. . . . He says in a sermon: 
‘Compare thyself with a soldier; when thou art standing in the 
service, bearing the mark of thy commander, thou canst with full 
confidence perform thy service. But when thou bearest it out 
of service the mark will not only be of no use for the service, 
but thou wilt be punished as a deserter.” 80 Indeed our modern 
word sacrament comes down to us from this early period of 
Christianity, being derived from sacramentum—a soldier’s oath. 
In later centuries we find the same idea cropping out. St. 
Columba, of Scotland, “from a child was enrolled for the war¬ 
fare of Christ.” 81 The Spanish Christians, driven from their 
homes by the Moors, looked upon themselves as soldiers of the 
cross. 82 

A most notable and interesting volume which has come 
down to us is the Enchiridion Militis Christiani, or The Manual 
of the Christian Knight, by Erasmus, which was published in 
1501. 83 The Enchiridion is a manual of Christian ethics. 84 It 
was written as “a Compendious Treatise of the Soldier of 
Christ” for a courtier who was a friend of the author. 85 To this 
knightly friend Erasmus specifically explains the object of the 
book: “That thou mightest quickly wax big and strong in him, 
and spring up unto a perfect man.” 86 Let us take two short 
passages which will suffice to give us the key-note of the entire 
book. Near the beginning of the Enchiridion Erasmus writes: 
“Oh thou Christian man, rememberest thou not when thou wert 

80 Neander: Memorials of Christian Life in the Early and Middle Ages, quo. 
in Brain: Morning Watch, 354. 

^MacCracken and Piper: Lives of Leaders of Church Universal, I, 110. 

82 Buckle: History of Civilisation, II, 13. 

^Erasmus: Enchiridion, closing paragraph. 

84 Cambridge Modern History, I, 571. 

^Erasmus: Enchiridion, edition published by Methuen and Co., Eondon, 1905, 
p. 41. 

^The same, 286. 


25 


professed and consecrate with the holy mysteries, . . . how 
thou boundest thyself to be a faithful soldier unto thy captain? 87 
And near the end of the little book, the distinguished humanist 
writes: “This only was my desire ... to show a certain man¬ 
ner and craft of a new kind of war, how thou mightest arm 
thyself against the evils of the old life bourgeoning forth again 
and springing afresh.” 88 Here, then, we find again the very 
thought which is to be the core of our own study of the religious 
life as a higher warfare. 

Crippled while leading his troops in battle, a brave Spanish 
officer was forced to abandon military service. While in the hos¬ 
pital, under treatment for his wounds, the inspiration came to 
him to organize a religious soldiery. This was the origin of the 
Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola. The 
Spiritual Exercises, the famous volume of Saint Ignatius, 
was written by Loyola as a spiritual drill manual for his 
followers. 89 “In a life-picture of Christ it is shown how man 
must prove himself in the war for and with Christ.” 90 A notable 
passage is that which describes The Two Standards, “a sort of 
a parable in which St. Ignatius represents our Lord and Lucifer 
as two captains armed one against another, and calling all men 
to their standards.” 91 Even before the Society of Jesus was 
dreamed of by the wounded Loyola, the Abbot of the Benedic¬ 
tine Abbey of Monserrat, Garcias Cisneros, in 1493, “composed a 
Book of Spiritual Exercises, from which Ignatius of Loyola may 
have borrowed the title for his very different and much more 
scientific treatise, when he retired to this convent and was guided 
by the Benedictine Chanones.” 92 Any such indebtedness, how¬ 
ever, is strenuously denied by the biographers of Ignatius. 93 

Let us now turn from the Jesuit, Loyola, to the immortal 
brazier, or tinker, of Bedford. That John Bunyan for a time 
was in military service is recorded for us by Macaulay thus: 
“When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life 
was interrupted by an event which gave a lasting color to his 

87 The same, 45. 

88 The same, 283. 

80 In the copy of this book in my possession the title is given as Manresa, or 
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. (London: Burns and Oates.) Manresa 

was the town in which Saint Ignatius practised his austerities upon himself. See 
Bouhours: Life of St. Ignatius, 72 ff. 

°°McClintock and Strong: Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Cyclopaedia, 
V, 535, 

81 Manresa, or The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, 166. 

82 Cambridge Modern History, I, 651. 

e3 For example, Bouhours: Life of St. Ignatius, 95. 


26 


thoughts. He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served 
during the decisive campaign of 1645. All that we know of his 
military career is that, at the siege of Leicester, one of his com¬ 
rades, who had taken his post, was killed by a shot from the 
town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as having been 
saved from death by the interference of Providence. It may be 
observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the 
glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last 
he loved to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps 
and fortresses, from guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and 
regiments arrayed, each under its own banner. His Greatheart, 
his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain Credence, are evidently 
portraits, of which the originals were among those martial saints 
who fought and expounded in Fairfax’s army.” 94 Everybody 
has read Pilgrim's Progress. Probably few, however, have 
ever read the Holy War, in which is an account of the capture 
of Mansoul by Diabolus and its re-taking by Emmanuel. Some 
of the most suggestive passages describe the storming of Eye- 
Gate, Ear-Gate, etc. 93 Says a literary critic: “His Holy War 
is a powerful allegory, and it has been called a prose Paradise 
Lost A 96 

We must hurriedly trace the idea down through some 
other writers who have pictured the religious life as a warfare. 
Of the Faerie Queene (the first three books of which were pub¬ 
lished in 1590), its author, Edmund Spenser, tells us: “I labour 
to portraict in Arthure, before he was King, the image of a 
brave Knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as 
Aristotle hath devised.” The plan was to have twelve Knights, 
personifying twelve virtues, fight with opposing vices. 97 From 
the title of one of George Herbert’s poems, The Church Militant, 
one would naturally expect to find in that poem something bear¬ 
ing on our present line of thought. But no specific contribution 
is made. For a long time it was supposed that the author of the 
book Batalla Spiritual—Spiritual Combat —was Juan de Castag- 
niza, but the authorship of this work is now attributed to the 
monk, Laurent Scupoli. 98 As I write, I have before me a pic¬ 
ture of the title-page and description of John Downame’s Chris - 

M Macaulay: Critical, Historical and Miscellaneous Essays, III, 255. 

*>*The Holy War is published in inexpensive form in the Temple Classics. 

C6 Halleck: History of English Literature, 227. 

Halleck: History of English Literature. 129. 

B8 Comp. Upham: Life of Madame Guyon, 191; and McClintock and Strong, 
XI, 837. 


27 


tian Warfare against the Devil, World and Flesh . This was 
one of the volumes presented to Harvard College by its founder, 
and is the only book of all that were given by John Harvard to 
the institution which bears his name, to escape the flames which 
destroyed the college library in 1764." Milton’s great epic, Par¬ 
adise Lost, begins with an account of Satan’s revolt in heaven, 
his conflict with the Almighty, and his banishment of himself 
and his rebellious legions from heaven. The fallen angels then 
hold a council and plot the fall of man as a means of reveng¬ 
ing themselves upon God. 100 Historians tell us that “Corneille 
sang of magnanimity, of loftiness of soul. . . . He depicted 
those ‘warrior souls’ whom Bossuet was later to call to mind; 
and at his bidding there passes before our eyes a long procession 
of combatant spirits.” 101 Novalis describes life as a battle and 
a march. 102 

Coming down to later times, we find Dr. Bushnell discours¬ 
ing on such a theme as “Military Discipline.” 103 Charles Kings¬ 
ley has left us some suggestive sermons on such themes as “A 
Soldier’s Training” and “The Battle Within.” 104 Wendell Phil¬ 
lips once gave an address on “Christianity a Battle, not a Dream.” 
It was in this discourse that the great agitator uttered his mem¬ 
orable saying that “one soul with an idea outweighs ninety- 
nine men moved only by interests.” 105 Many years after the 
death of Henry Ward Beecher, some threescore of outlines of 
sermons preached by him, mostly in 1864-65, were brought to¬ 
gether in a volume under three headings, namely, “The Sum¬ 
mons,” “The Warfare” and “The Great Commander.” 100 Dr. 
Charles E. Jefferson, that doughty anti-militarist, abounds in the 
use of our figure. For example, take such a passage as this: 
“According to the Christian religion, the whole world is a battle 
field, and we are all called to be soldiers. . . . Unless a man is 
willing to suffer he cannot be a soldier of the cross.” 107 And his 
address on “The New Crusade” is one of the most stirring moral 
bugle-calls of modern times. 108 The military conception even 


"See Boston Herald, Nov. 22, 1907. 

100 Milton: Paradise Lost. 

101 Cambridge Modern History, V, 66. 

102 See Vaughan: Hours with the Mystics, II, 349. 

10S Bushnell: Sermons on Liznng Subjects, 397. 

104 Kingsley: Village Sermons and Town and Country Sermons, 213, 422. 
105 Wendell Phillips: Speeches, Lectures and Addresses, II, 276 ff. 

1M Sertnon Briefs by Henry Ward Beecher, published by The Pilgrim Press. 
107 Jefferson: Doctrine and Deed, 121-2. 

108 Jefferson: The New Crusade. 


28 


percolates through into rituals, and in the Protestant Episcopal 
Book of Common Prayer, in the formula for the administration 
of baptism “to those of riper years,” it is prescribed that the 
minister shall make a cross upon the person’s forehead and say: 
“We receive this person into the congregation of Christ’s flock; 
and do sign him with the sign of the cross, in token that here¬ 
after he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ cruci¬ 
fied, and manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the 
world, and the devil; and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier 
and servant unto his life’s end.” 109 

♦ 

This survey, lengthy as it is, traces in a most hurried fash¬ 
ion the idea down through the centuries. Let us bring it to a 
close by a reference to Phillips Brooks, who wrote a great ser¬ 
mon on The Battle of Life. Later one of his volumes bore 
this same title. His thought was that we should keep the rec¬ 
ord of military heroisms, but not turn back to military warfare. 
To quote his own words used in the sermon on The Battle of 
Life, “Life is a battle. . . . if we are earnest men.” 110 And in 
his sermon before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Com¬ 
pany of Boston, he expanded the thought thus: “There is noth¬ 
ing good or glorious which war has brought forth in human 
nature which peace may not produce more richly and more per¬ 
manently. When we cease to think of peace as the negative of 
war, and think of war as the negative of peace, making war and 
not peace the exception and interruption of human life, making 
peace and not war the type and glory of existence, then shall 
shine forth the higher soldiership of the higher battles. Then 
the first military spirit and its works shall seem to be but crude 
struggles after, and rehearsals for, that higher fight, the fight 
after the eternal facts and their obedience, the fight against the 
perpetually intrusive lie, which is the richer glory of the riper 
man. The facts of government, the facts of commerce, the facts 
of science, the facts of society, the facts of history, the facts of 
man, the facts of God, in these, in the perception of their glory, 
in the obedience to their compulsion, shall be the possibility and 
promise of the soldier statesman, the soldier scientist, the soldier 
philanthropist, the soldier priest, the soldier man. ‘The sword 
is beaten into the ploughshare, the spear into the pruning-hook.’ 

109 Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. 

110 Brooks: Sermons, VI, 62, 71 ff. 


29 


‘The war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are furled/ 
But it is not that the power of fight has perished: it is that the 
battle has gone up on to higher ground, and into higher light. 
The battle is above the clouds.” 111 

2. The idea readily understood by all. 

The military notion of life has, at least, the merit of being 
universally understood. A blood-drenched world knows all too 
well what war means. As Mrs. Livermore, in one of her trench¬ 
ant lectures, says: “Our estimates of earthly life vary accord¬ 
ing to our positions and experience. To one, life is a ‘vale of 
tears/ ... To another, life is a pilgrimage to a better country. 
. . . To a third, life is only an ‘inscrutable mystery/ . . . 
Others will tell you that ‘life is a great game’—that it is a brief 
‘gala day’—and so on, through the whole range of metaphor and 
symbolry. But when it is declared that life is a battle, a state¬ 
ment is made that appeals to every one. ... As our experi¬ 
ence deepens we realize that the whole world is one vast encamp¬ 
ment, and that every man and woman is a soldier.” 112 Rich and 
poor, educated and ignorant, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and 
Gentile, alike recognize the fitness of the figure. Old age gath¬ 
ers up profoundest philosophy from its wealth of experience and 
epitomizes it all in the statement, “life is a battle,” and even 
childhood understands. 

“ ‘What is Life, father?’ 

‘A Battle, my child, 

Where the strongest lance may fail, 

Where the wariest eyes may be beguiled, 

And the stoutest heart may quail. 

Where the foes are gathered on every hand 
And rest not day or night, 

And the feeble little ones must stand 
In the thickest of the fight.’ ” 113 

Indeed there is no figure so literally true to life, so close to fact, 
as this, that life is a struggle and a warfare. 

3. The martial note in great hymns. 

Hymnology follows homiletics in its frequent allusions to 
the soldier type. From Luther’s Ein Feste Burg, which Heine 

m Phillips Brooks: Sermon before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Com¬ 
pany of Boston. 

112 Mrs. Mary A. Livermore: The Battle of Life. 

113 Adelaide Anne Proctor: Life and Death. 


30 


describes as “the Marsellaise of the Reformation,” 114 (“God 
Almighty’s Grenadier March,” as Carlyle called it), 115 down to 
Baring-Gould’s Onward Christian Soldiers, George Duffield’s 
Stand up, Stand up for Jesus, and Reginald Heber’s The Son of 
God goes forth to War, not a few of the great hymns, which 
have stirred the heart and nerved the will to action, have been 
keyed to a martial note. 

For instance, let us take one of the best of our modern 
hymnals ( The Pilgrim Hymnal, edited by my good friend, 
Charles L. Noyes), and from it cull out just a few of the mili¬ 
tary hymns. Besides the hymns mentioned -above, we find one 
by St. Andrew of Crete (660-732), beginning, 

“Christian, dost thou see them? 

• ••••• 

Christian, up and smite them.” 116 

Then there is Charles Wesley’s 

“Soldiers of Christ, arise 
And put your armor on.” 117 

The familiar hymn of George Heath, 1781, 

“My soul, be on thy guard, 

Ten thousand foes arise,” 

is also here. 118 

“Brightly gleams our banner” is another familiar hymn. 119 

One of the best is Samuel Longfellow’s 

“God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world; 

Now each man to his post.” 120 

Best of all in this collection, in my judgment, is Ernest 
W. Shurtlefif’s 

“Lead on, O King Eternal, 

The day of march has come.” 121 

Nor should we forget the hymn of John Addington 
Symonds, “These Things Shall Be.” Mention should also be 

lu Spargo: Karl Marx, 24; Cambridge Modern History, II, 201. 

11B Carlyle: Frederick the Great, I, 322. 

U6 Pilgrim Hymnal, No. 315. 
m The same, No. 318. 

118 The same. No. 320. 
nB The same, No. 324. 

120 The same, No. 327. 

121 The same, No. 322. 


3i 


made of the hymn, “Hear, O Ye Nations,” which Frederick L. 
Hosmer wrote for the Second National Peace Congress: 

“Hear, hear, O ye Nations, and hearing obey 
The cry from the past and the call of to-day! 

Earth wearies and wastes with her fresh life outpoured, 
With glut of the cannon, and spoil of the sword. 

“A new era opens, transcending the old, 

It calls for new leaders, for new ranks enrolled; 

From war’s grim tradition it maketh appeal, 

To service of man in the world’s commonweal. 

“The workers afield, in the mill and the mart, 

In commerce, in council, in science and art, 

Shall bring of their gifts and together create, 

The manifold life of the firm-builded State. 

“And more shall the triumph of right over wrong, 

Be shield to the weak and a curb to the strong, 

When counsel prevails and, the battle-flags furled, 

The High Court of Nations gives law to the world. 

“And Thou, O my Country, from many made one, 

Last born of the nations, at morning Thy sun, 

Arise to the place Thou art given to fill, 

And lead the world-triumph of peace and good-will.” 122 

Moreover, it is significant that a large number of once 
familiar and popular hymns have fallen into conspicuous disuse. 
I refer to that class of hymns which admonished men to escape 
from perdition regardless of whether other men might be per¬ 
ishing or not. Instead of tolerating such extremely selfish indi¬ 
vidualism to-day, hymnody directs its efforts to emphasizing 
that we are “Saved to Serve”; and the generous space accorded 
to hymns of service in any modern hymnal is encouraging, since 
it indicates that religious minstrelsy is being humanized and 
socialized. 

4. Biography and the military type. 

Biography adds its voice to homiletics and hymnology. 
The early martyrs, the reformers who ushered in new epochs in 
history, the Pilgrim and Puritan of the old world and the new, 

122 Frederick L. Hosmer, in Proceedings of Second National Peace Congress, 
Chicago, 1909, p. 8. 


32 


all breathed essentially a soldier morality. Some of the choicest 
characters the world has known have been men who actually 
lived a soldier life and formed the soldier habit. Claudius, of 
Northern Italy, was a soldier for a time, as was also Zwingli. 123 
Loyola, too, as we have seen, was a soldier until so severely 
wounded that he could no longer serve. Such men could 
have said: 

“But as a soldier I the mail put on 
Now for a higher aim the sword be drawn.” 124 
Concerning Saint Francis of Assisi, Sabatier says: “They have 
written a life of Saint Francis as a bard, they would have been 
able to write it better as a knight, for this is the explanation of 
all his life and as the heart of his heart.” 125 

“He who seemed a soldier born, 

He should have the helmet worn, 

All friends to fend, all foes defy, 

Fronting foes of God and man, 

Frowning down the evil-doer, 

Battling for the weak and poor.” (Emerson.) 

The “Christian Soldier” type has been embodied in such 
men as Sir Henry Havelock, “Chinese” Gordon, Samuel Chap¬ 
man Armstrong and Oliver Otis Howard. Their soldierly self- 
discipline helped to make them the splendid Christians that they 
were rated. 128 

Robertson, of Brighton, was one of the most soldierly 
souls that ever lived. He owed not a little to the early years 
of his life which were spent in barracks. 127 His father was a 
captain in the Royal Artillery. Two of his brothers won hon- 

123 Lives of Leaders, I, 158. 

124 Goethe: Faust, Part II, 244. 

125 Sabatier: Vie de St. Francois, 145. 

126 Though they would have been far more consistent followers of the Prince of 
Peace if they never had drawn sword. It is impossible for us to think of Jesus 
as wearing the accoutrements of a soldier. Had he been a military man he would not 
be called “Christ” by so many millions to-day. The spirit of Jesus is essentially un¬ 
like the spirit of military soldierdom. “Contending nations and armies violate every 
precept of the gospel. Rehearse all the catalogue of graces, and mark how we 
are enjoined to be meek, lowly, peaceable, easy to be entreated, gentle—merciful, 
slow to anger, given to quietness, patience, temperance,—War sets them all at 
nought!” (Howard Malcolm: War Inconsistent zvith Christianity, see Tract No. 
XVI in The Book of Peace.) Take Sir Henry Havelock’s case, for example. We 
find him thanking God that he has been allowed to realize the darling ambition of 
his life, namely, to command victorious troops in battle. Is this the spirit of him 
who “came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them”? ( Luke 9:56). How could 
a man be filled with the spirit of him who said “put up thy sword” (John 18:11) 
and “love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44). and carry out military orders to “disperse 
and utterly destroy all mutineers and insurgents”? ( Encyc . Brit., art. “Havelock,” 
XI. 526). Has not the “Christian soldier” business been overdone, and have not 
“Christian soldiers” been over-rated as Christians? 

127 See Brastow: Representative Modern Preachers, 54. 


33 


orable mention in the Kaffir War, and another brother was a 
captain in the Royal South Lincoln Militia. As a boy, he 
loved to fancy himself a knight, seeking adventure, redressing 
wrong.” 128 An enthusiasm for military life was literally born 
in him. “I was rocked and cradled,” so he wrote, “to the roar 
of artillery, and the very name of such things sounds to me like 
home. A review . . . impresses me to tears; I cannot see a 
regiment manoeuvre, nor artillery in motion, without a chok¬ 
ing sensation.” 129 He planned to enter the army. Says his 
biographer: “The trained obedience of an army to one head, 
harmonized with his own strong conception of the beauty of 
order and the dignity of duty. All the impulses of his charac¬ 
ter to self-sacrifice, chivalry, daring, romantic adventure, the 
conquest of oppression, the living of life intensely, he looked 
forward to satisfying as a soldier.” 130 When Robertson was 
ordained, the text of the ordination sermon was “endure hard¬ 
ness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” 131 More than once, he 
felt that in entering the ministry instead of the army, he had 
mistaken his profession. To friends he remarked that he “would 
rather lead a forlorn hope than mount the pulpit stairs.” 132 
From the Tyrol, where Hofer had been governor, he wrote: “I 
drew his sword, and almost felt that it was done with a soldier’s 
feeling.” 133 Says Stopford Brooke: “Men still recall the deep, 
almost stern enthusiasm of joy with which he spoke of the 
great obedience of the soldiers who died in the wreck of the 
Birkenhead.” 134 On one occasion he wrote: “I wish I had been 
with my own gallant, wondrous regiment in that campaign.” 135 
And these are his words again: “As I walked home in my 
dragoon cloak, I thought that I ought to be at this moment lying 
in it at rest at Moodkee, where the Third fought so gallantly, 
and where spots of brighter green than usual are the only record 
to mark where the flesh of heroes is melting into its kindred dust 
again.” 136 He reaches the very height of his eloquence “in de¬ 
scribing the glorious deaths of the heroes of Trukkee, the gath¬ 
ering of the bravest in battle round the torn colours which sym- 

128 Brooke: Life of Robertson, I, 1-2, 4. 

129 The same, I, 9. 

130 The same, I, 11. 

131 The same, I, 55. 

133 The same, I, 96. 

133 The same, I, 116. 

134 The same, I, 190. 

136 The same, I, 269. 

186 The same, I, 291. 


34 


bolize courage and honour, and the chivalry of war in contrast 
with a selfish and ignoble peace.” 137 In all his honest, fearless 
thinking, in his risking and abandon, in his self-forgetful self- 
sacrifices, Robertson ever was essentially a soldier. This is the 
key-note of his character. 138 

5. Religion set forth in terms of personal relation. 

Then, again, this conception of the religious life as a mili¬ 
tary service meets the demand of to-day that religious truth shall 
be expressed in terms of personal relation. Personality is the 
great psychological word in our day. Things, doctrines, systems 
of thought, are less important than personality. As President 
Henry Churchill King so well says: “There is no greater need, 
in religious living and theological thinking to-day, than a thor¬ 
ough-going and consistent hold on . . . religion as a personal 
relation to God.” 139 And an English contemporary writes: 
“Religion is a great force, but it requires a personality to exhibit 
that force. It is not in theories, nor in arguments, nor in con¬ 
troversies that its real power is manifest, but in the lives of 
men.” 140 “Our ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of per¬ 
sonal worth. All other values are relative to value for, of, or 
in a person. To speak of any progress or improvement or devel¬ 
opment of a nation or society or mankind, except as relative to 
some greater worth of persons, is to use words without mean¬ 
ing. . . . The spiritual progress of mankind is ... an unmean¬ 
ing phrase, unless it means a progress of personal character and 
to personal character—a progress of which feeling, thinking and 
willing subjects are the agents and sustainers, and of which 
each step is a fuller realization of the capacities of such sub¬ 
jects. It is simply unintelligible unless understood to be in the 
direction of more perfect forms of personal life.” 141 The con¬ 
templation of the religious man as a soldier, as one enlisted under 
God in the moral warfare against wrong, seems to meet the 
demand of an age that is rejecting the dogmatic, the mechanical, 
the sacerdotal, and insisting on the personal, the vital, the 
practical. 

6. Soldierly religion in harmony with the spirit of the 

times. 

137 The same, II, 90. 

188 Compare the same, I, 55. 

139 King: Reconstruction in Theology, 200. 

u0 Carpenter: Permanent Elements of Religion, 246. 

141 Thomas Hill Green: Prolegomena to Ethics; see Rand: The Classical Mor¬ 
alists, 744, 746. 


35 


Phillips Brooks used to say, “God pity the man that does 
not appreciate the spirit of his own age.” No man can hope for 
a hearing to-day who does not know the habits of thought of 
to-day and who cannot express himself in terms of present-day 
thought. But what is the spirit of to-day ? Let us listen to 
Professor Eucken’s description of the Greeks when Greece was 
in its best days: “Nothing about the Greeks impresses one more 
than their great energy of life, the strong impetus towards the 
development of every faculty, the youthful, ever-fresh pleasure 
in creative activity.” 142 I like to think that this characterization 
of the ancient Greeks is descriptive of our own times. Cer¬ 
tainly the spirit of the age is strenuousness. 143 Men, nations, 
business, politics, literature, all live the strenuous life. Great 
business men are styled “Captains of Finance.” Labor is organ¬ 
ized into armies. Life all along the line is strenuous and mili¬ 
taristic ; the pace is set, the demands are inexorable. As my 
good friend, Daniel Evans, says: “We are believers in the posi¬ 
tive life. We love the heroic. ... We want to be something. 
We have little sympathy with the desire to be nothing. And 
we go in for the strenuous thing.” 144 If a kingdom of righteous¬ 
ness is to be realized, then the religion of to-day and to-morrow 
must needs be of such strenuousness that it shall appeal to and 
conquer men of strenuous thinking and strenuous acting. Men, 
as never before, are insisting that religion shall have reality, sim¬ 
plicity, virility and fraternity, and by these things prove its 
divinity. 

If the church is not gaining ground, is it not because our 
religion is not militant enough, our love not sufficiently athletic 
and soldierly? The church, perhaps, has been too much a hos¬ 
pital. It should be less like a hospital and more like an army 
in the field. The church of to-morrow will be a mighty army of 
righteousness. The religionist of to-morrow will conform more 
to the soldier type. 

“Doubtless his church will be no hospital 
For superannuate forms and mumping shams, 

••••••* 

Nor his religion but an ambulance 

lia Eucken: Problem of Human Life, 4. 

143 Read, for example, Roosevelt: The Strenuous Life. 

1<4 Prof. Daniel Evans: The Ethics of Jesus, in Harvard Theological Review, 


36 


To fetch life’s wounded and malingerers in, 

Scorned by the strong.” 145 

“Scorned by the strong!” What is wrong? Here is the church 
sorely needing the strong; and the strong, too often, seem to 
have little but scorn for her and hers. Why? Because reli¬ 
gion, men think, is good enough for the weak, the sick, the dying, 
or for the people who fail. But to the ones who are neither 
sick, dying, weak nor defeated, religion seems to offer little. 
Why not hold up such a manly type of religion and ideals of 
such strenuousness, that every person who has a particle of the 
hero spirit in him must needs accept the challenge? Why not 
appeal to the young Philip Sidneys of our day who are saying 
in their heart of hearts: “If there are any good wars, I shall 
go to them.” 149 The militant type of religion is such a “good 
war,” and we must help the young Sidneys to find this out. At 
a recent commencement in one of our great colleges, a spirited 
poem was read by a member of the graduating class. Nothing 
made a deeper impression at that commencement. And no won¬ 
der, for here are a couple of stanzas:— 

“There’s a trampling of hoofs in the busy street, 

There’s a clanking of sabres on floor and stair, 

There’s a sound of restless, hurrying feet, 

Of voices that whisper, of lips that entreat, 

Will they live, will they die, will they strive, will they dare? 
The houses are garlanded, flags flutter gay, 

For a troop of the Guard rides forth to-day. 

• •••••••••• 

“On, up! Boot and saddle ! Give spurs to your steeds! 
There’s a city beleaguered that cries for men’s deeds; 

For the faith that is strength and the love that is God! 

On through the dawning! Humanity calls ! 

Life’s not a dream in the clover! 

On to the walls, on to the walls, 

On to the walls, and over!” 147 

7. Organized evil makes necessary a militant and organ¬ 
ized righteousness. 

Evil is mighty to-day and is powerfully organized. Such 

14B I,owell: The Cathedral, Works, X, 57. 

148 George William Curtis: Sir Philip Sidney. 

117 Hermann Hagedorn, Jr.: Harvard Class Day Poem; 1907; see Boston 
Transcript,, Jujne 21, 1907. 


37 


strenuous and organized wickedness can be overmatched only by 
a strenuous and organized righteousness. “Zeal must be met by 
zeal,” cried Dominic, as he flung himself into the task of organ¬ 
izing the Black Friars. 148 Or to quote the words of Edmund 
Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else 
they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible 
struggle.” 149 'Theodore Parker used to say that it is the mis¬ 
sion of America to organize the rights of man. ir '° Similarly we 
may say that it is the high mission of truly religious men to 
organize righteousness. This is the task of our day. 

8 . The soldiers life full of useful and stimulating illus¬ 
trations. 

Some may think, possibly, that this sketching of the relig¬ 
ious person as a soldier is purely fanciful, and argue that there 
is no real connection between the two characters. Hence, to such, 
the time spent in reading this study seems wasted. Patience! 
Possibly the quest may not be so utterly fruitless. “All the 
various departments of human knowledge are so related to each 
other as to form parts of an organic whole. There is a 'unity 
of the sciences’ in virtue of which one depends upon and grows 
out of another.” 151 Eagerly and perseveringly did the philoso¬ 
phers seek for an underlying unity. 152 What the philosophers 
missed because they lacked sufficient data, the scientists have 
brought to light. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, pioneered the way, 
when he spoke of “a unity in diversity of phenomena; a har¬ 
mony blending together all created things, however dissimilar in 
form and attributes.” Our modern evolutionary science fur¬ 
nishes illustrations without number of this principle enunciated 
in the Cosmos, illustrations that would have astonished Hum¬ 
boldt himself, daring pioneer thinker that he was. And we are 
not done, even yet. Probably we have but just begun to master 
the alphabet of wonders. Whether light and electricity shall be 
found to be one and the same thing; whether the life principle 
itself some day shall be identified with electricity; whether the 
search for a primal matter may one day be rewarded, it is a lit¬ 
tle too early to say. 153 We are fully warranted, however, in 

148 Green: Short History of the English People, 172. 

148 Pdmund Burke: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. 

160 Theodore Parker: Discourses on Politics, Works, Cobbe edition, IV, 82. 

151 Anderson: The Larger Faith, 121. 

1B2 Road Hoffding: History of Modern Philosophy. 

153 But read Carl Snyder: New Conceptions in Science; and The Hibhert Journal, 
January, 1912, 308. 


33 


saying that all facts of life and knowledge are bound together. 
If one is a good scientist and philosopher by so much ought he 
to be the better theologian. What Professor James recommends 
to the philosopher is equally well worth heeding by the theolo¬ 
gian, namely, ‘'the example of the sister sciences, interpreting 
the unobserved by the observed.” 154 

Whatever, therefore, will afford a new vantage-point from 
which to view old truths is not to be despised. Let one master 
the laws of music, or of painting, and he will better understand 
the fundamental laws of harmony and obedience. A Ruskin 
masters the details of architecture and straightway falls a preach¬ 
ing. A Drummond peers through the biologist’s microscope and 
his Natural Law in the Spiritual World links science and 
religion, and both science and religion shine forth more clearly 
for the union. For nature is preaching to us ten thousand ser¬ 
mons if we but have eyes to see and ears to hear. Jesus’s 
choice parables were romantic with nature and the every¬ 
day. “All things in nature,” wrote Tertullian, “are prophetic 
outlines of divine operations, God not merely speaking parables, 
but doing them.” 155 And blind Milton saw truly when he sang: 

“What if earth 

Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein, 

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.” 

If, then, as scientists have argued 150 and bards have sung, 
an essential unity underlies all life, then may we legitimately 
think that the well established principles of one branch of human 
knowledge may, possibly, furnish some light on other problems 
less clearly understood. If we study the spider’s web in our 
path, perhaps it may suggest to us how to build suspension 
bridges. If we watch the tea-kettle, a steam engine some day 
may be the result. Begin with what we know, or what is avail¬ 
able, and we shall go on to learn more. The way to master 
great problems is to commence at the small end. 157 A b uno 
disce omnes. From one learn all. 158 It is on this assumption 
that this study is prepared. We know what makes a soldier 
successful. From this may we not learn how to become 

1B4 James: Pragmatism, 69. 

165 See Trench: Parables, 17, note. 

1B0 Smyth: Through Science to Faith, 12. 

1B7 Brooke Herford: Small End of Great Problems. 

1B8 March: Thesaurus, 1. 


39 


successful soldiers of righteousness? The religious life may be 
studied to advantage from such view-points as are afforded by 
any of the great activities of men, and our faith vision will be 
the clearer for the study. Says Professor Genung: “Let us 
not make light of the analogies, the concrete images, by which 
men hew their ideals to practical use. Let us not call their val¬ 
ues small because these happen to be literary values. Think 
how immensely men have profited, through all the years, by 
imagining themselves as . . . fighting a battle.” 159 

If war should cease this day and cease forever, if the sol¬ 
dier should march from the centre of the stage which he has so 
long occupied, and if Othello should pass from sight nevermore 
to return except in literature, still the historic soldier would be 
a fascinating and rewarding character to study, and the vanished 
warfare would still have its lessons for us; even as knighthood 
furnishes, to this day, some of the most inspiring and useful 
models after which to fashion some of our boys’ organizations, 
etc. The old chivalry died even before Cervantes’ time, but true 
chivalry lives on and will never die. 160 So, too, the military type 
will live on after international warfare shall have ceased. 

9. The demand for heroes perpetual. 

Even in an age of world-wide peace, with all the help that 
we can get from improved machinery, we shall continue to need 
men who are willing to put their lives in jeopardy for the com¬ 
mon good. As John D. Long says: “It takes more courage to 
run a locomotive seventy miles an hour than it does to be one of 
100,000 men on a battlefield. The miner a thousand feet under¬ 
ground, amid damps and falling walls of rock, the faithful police¬ 
man, the supremely heroic fireman, is in more danger than a 
sailor on an ironclad at Manila or Santiago. More lives are 
lost in a steamboat explosion than Arnold lost in his midnight 
attack on Quebec. Life is full, though war cease, of adventure, 
of danger, of opportunities for heroic deeds, for the sacrifice of 
life if need be for country and humanity. Let the young reader 
have no fear that there are not always worlds to conquer and 
glory to win. . . . The great thing is to put the heroic quali¬ 
ties, which the boy admires in the men of whom he reads in 
famous battles, into the boy himself when he shall take part in 
the battle of life. These are not battles of armed ranks against 

1Ba Genung: Hebrew Literature of Wisdom, 315-16. 

160 Compare EJ. H. Chapin: Modern Chivalry. 


40 


armed ranks, they are not battles where uniforms glitter and 
bugles ring, and shot and shell carry havoc; but they are battles 
of honor in daily life, of honesty against temptation to dishon¬ 
esty, of purity of life against corrupting blight, of faithful 
endeavor under difficulties, of steady pursuit of good ends, and 
of high, noble, manly character. In these may we all, fighting 
famous battles, win famous victories.” 161 

The soldier spirit can find ample outlet in the occupations 
which jeopardize life and limb, and in waging the battles of the 
higher soldiership. The religious life is essentially heroic. To 
borrow the thought of Eucken: “Its heroism is radically differ¬ 
ent from the ancient heroism; it is a heroism of the inner nature, 
and of simple humanity, a heroism in little things, a greatness 
arising from joyous faith and ungrudging self-sacrifice.” 162 To 
resist the temptations of the times, to be loyal to one’s ideals, 
loyal to one’s fellows, will challenge the stoutest heart and steadi¬ 
est brain. And this is religion. Fine tribute that, which Victor 
Hugo pays to a certain character! “To combat Pharisaism; to 
unmask imposture; to overthrow tyrannies, usurpations, preju¬ 
dices, falsehoods, superstitions; to demolish the temple in order 
to rebuild it, that is to say, to replace the false by the true; to 
attack a ferocious magistracy, a sanguinary priesthood; to take 
a whip and drive the money-changers from the sanctuary; to 
reclaim the heritage of the disinherited; to protect the weak, 
the poor, the suffering, the overwhelmed, to struggle for the per¬ 
secuted and oppressed—that was the war of Jesus Christ.” 163 
Plenty of this kind of war remains to be fought, even though 
we relegate cannon and torpedo to dusty museums and grim 
chambers of horrors! “Isn’t there enough unconquered evil left 
in the world to satisfy all the fighting-blood in my veins?” The 
answer is, “Yes! A thousand times, yes!” As Sheridan said to 
a straggler who could not find his own company, “Pitch in any¬ 
where ; there’s fighting enough all along the line.” 164 

Thus, though the soldier is to pass, the soldier spirit neces¬ 
sarily will ever abide among men. Strenuousness, idealism, rigid 
self-discipline, the jeopardizing of life and limb for worthy ends, 
loyalty to leadership—these things will never die out. They will 
always appeal to men. Men love dash and heroism, men will 

161 John D. Long in Vol. XVI of Young Folks’ Library, intro, xvii-xviii. 

162 Eucken: Problem of Human Life, 148-9. 

i63yictor Hugo: Voltaire. 

16i Christian Endeavor World, April 5, 1905. 


41 



ever court danger, men will always play with death, because, I 
suppose, we are all of us born with more or less of the hero and 
martyr in our blood. But all this can exist and be cultivated 
without strife. The soldier spirit will find ample outlets in ways 
that are worthy instead of insane, useful instead of wasteful. 
And if the long dreary centuries of bloodshed shall give us a 
virile, soldiery type of character, they will not have been all a 
useless and meaningless waste. I am tempted to say that such 
a type of manhood would be worth such awful cost. 

io. Certain great movements prophetic of a substitution 
of religion for war. 

War and religion seem always to have been closely bound 
up together. Allusion has been made to Mithraism, and we 
have seen that it distinctly embodied the military idea so that 
“above all it was popular in the army. . . . One of the first 
stages in the initiation, for men, consisted in the devotee receiv¬ 
ing a sword, and being called a soldier of Mithra. Thus Mith¬ 
raism was specially the faith of the soldiery; and in doing honor 
to the invincible sun-god Mithra . . . the Emperor Constantine 
vied with the most loyal Mithraist long after his so-called con¬ 
version to Christianity.” 165 

Concerning Mohammedanism we are told: “Every major 
Moslem fit for military service is in duty bound to participate in 
holy wars against infidels who will not submit to the dominion 
of Moslems. ... In accordance with the letter of the Koran, 
. . . war against non-Mohammedans is declared permanent. 
. . . Therefore, in earlier times, when the Islamitic powers 
decided to discontinue hostilities, they simply concluded a 
truce.” 166 Says Milman: “The Koran was a declaration of war 
against mankind. . . . Religious war is the duty, the glory, 
assures the beatitude of the true believer. . . . What may be 
considered the dying words, the solemn bequest of Mohammed 
to mankind, were, ‘O true believers! Wage war against such 
of the infidels as are near you, and let them find severity in you, 
and know that God is with them that fear him.’ ” 167 In Moham¬ 
medanism, then, we find religion and war inextricably inter- 

165 Religious Systems of the World , 208; comp. Gibbon: Decline and Fall of 
the Roman Empire, chapters XX and XXVIII; Tertullian, De Corona, XV; Gar- 
ucci: Mysteres du Syncretisme Phrygien, 1854, p. 34. 

168 McClintock and Strong, VI, 417. 

167 Milman: Latin Christianity, II, 141, 142, 143, 108-172. 


42 


twined. To use the words of Mohammed: “The sword is the 
key of Heaven and of Hell.” 168 

One of the most interesting institutions of all the centuries 
was chivalry. After the crusades one of the avowed features of 
chivalry was religion. The investiture of the knight corresponded 
to the ordination of the priest. 169 Among the Saxons, investiture 
was preceded by a confession of sin and other religious rites, and 
the order of knighthood was received at the hands of a priest. 
“The sword was blessed by the priest, before it was delivered to 
the young warrior.” 170 Chivalry came to be regarded as the 
Holy Order. “The knightly and clerical characters were every¬ 
where considered as convertible, and the writers of romances 
faithfully reflected manners, when their hero at the commence¬ 
ment of the tale was a Sir Knight, and when at the close of the 
quests we find him a Sir Priest.” 171 

Let us look next at the crusades. Military Christianity, as 
we are told by the historian, Lecky, attained its climax at the 
crusades. 172 Chivalry also reached its very height during this 
movement. 173 Salvation was promised to those who took the 
cross. 174 Peter the Hermit and others preached the crusades 
with a religious fervor that was almost irresistibly hynotic. 175 
Unquestionably there were other motives than the religious which 
were held out. Hallam tells us that in the “later periods the 
temporal benefits of undertaking a crusade undoubtedly blended 
themselves with less selfish consideration. Men resorted to Pal¬ 
estine, as in modern times they have done to the colonies, in 
order to redeem their fame, or repair their fortune. ... To 
the more vulgar class were held out inducements, which, though 
absorbed in the overruling fanaticism of the first crusade, might 
be exceedingly efficacious when it began to flag. During the 
time that a crusader bore the cross he was free from suit for his 
debts, and the interest of them was entirely abolished; he was 
exempted, in some instances at least, from taxes, and placed 
under the protection of the church, so that he could not be im¬ 
pleaded in any civil court, except on criminal charges, or dis¬ 
putes relating to land. 176 

168 See Nitobe: Bushido, 131. 

160 See Hallam: Middle Ages, II, 508-581. 

170 Mills: History of Chivalry, I, 11, 12, 50. 

171 The same, I, 13-14; comp. Spenser -.Faerie Queene, book v, canto 5, st, 37. 

172 L,ecky: History of European Morals, Preface, x. 

17S See Hallam: Middle Ages, I, 62. 

174 Cox: The Crusades, 28. 

17B See the same, 31. 

176 Hallain: Middle Ages, I, 47. 


43 


The lamentable truth about the crusades is summed up for 
us by Judge William Jay: “In obedience to the exhortations, 
and prompted by the promises of the church, literally millions set 
off for the conquest of the Holy Land, first marking their gar¬ 
ments with the emblem of salvation. The assured absolution of 
crimes seems to have led to their indefinite multiplication. Never 
before or since has Europe witnessed such a horde of plunderers 
and murderers as these soldiers of the cross. The poet and the 
novelist, the sculptor and the painter, have conspired to array the 
crusader with holy zeal, and a noble heroism; but the relentless 
hand of the faithful historian tears from him his brilliant dis¬ 
guises, and exhibits him as a sanguinary ruffian, at once the slave 
of superstition and of passion. If the accounts given by con¬ 
temporary writers, o.f the extreme profligacy of the great mass 
of the crusaders be entitled to credit ... in morals, humanity, 
and good faith, the Christian invaders of Syria were surpassed 
by its Mohammedan defenders.” 177 

In spite of the horrid miscarriage of morality in the cru¬ 
sades, the point in which we are here interested is that they 
started as a religious movement. Moreover, they “gave rise to 
two orders of military friars: the Knights of the Temple, and 
the Knights of St. John, afterwards known as the Knights of 
Malta. These were peculiarly the soldiers of the church. They 
assumed various religious vows, devoted themselves to war, and 
received from popes and councils, honors and privileges. The 
Knights of Malta at one time took the diabolical oath, never to 
make peace with infidels.” 178 

Another interesting military religious movement found em¬ 
bodiment under Cromwell. In his Ironsides we see Protestant¬ 
ism booted and spurred. For his famous squadrons, the Pro¬ 
tector accepted only those “who had the fear of God before 
them, and made some conscience of what they did.” 179 He com¬ 
piled a “Soldier’s Pocket Bible” for the use of his troopers, “con¬ 
taining the most (if not all) those places contained in Holy 
Scriptures which do show the qualifications of his inner man, 
that is a fit soldier to fight the Lord’s Battles.” 180 Unfortunately 
war even under Cromwell descended, at times, to the very depths 

177 Judge Wm. Jay: Address before American Peace Society, 1845, 9. 

178 The same, 10; Compare Cox: The Crusades, 113; Mills: History of Chiv¬ 
alry, I, 333, Walker: A History of the Law of Nations, I, 870. 
in Cambridge Modern History, IV, 312. 
i8°Waylen: Mountain Pathways, 35-36. 


44 


of blood-shedding. As the scholarly Larned tells us: “The sav¬ 
age massacres which he (Cromwell) personally ordered at Dro¬ 
gheda and permitted at Wexford have left a stain on his memory 
too black to be effaced by his own defense of them, . . . that 
they would tend to prevent the future shedding of blood, by their 
terrorizing effect.” 181 I am not discussing Cromwell here except 
to call to mind that religion was no small factor in Ironside-ism. 

Let us next turn our attention to certain religious organiza¬ 
tions designed not to wield a material sword but to be a spiritual 
soldiery. As chief among these we must refer again to the Soci¬ 
ety of Jesus, or the Jesuits. Loyola’s society was organized Sep¬ 
tember 3, 1539. 182 “On September 27, 1540, the bull Regimini 
militantis ecclesiae was published, confirming the new order. 
... In the Latin translation of the original draft constitutions, 
approved by the pope, the word compania was represented by 
societas, though cohors or some such military term would have 
more exactly reproduced the founder's idea.” 183 The Jesuits were 
intended to be the militia of the Holy See. 184 Mobility and cos¬ 
mopolitanism were the new features differentiating the new order 
from the existing monastic communities. The reason why Igna¬ 
tius chose “the military word ‘company/ rather than ‘Order’ or 
‘Congregation,’ ” was, as he explained to Paul III, because, while 
“the ancient communities were, so to speak, the infantry of the 
church, whose duty it was to stand firmly in one place on the 
battlefield, the Jesuits, contrariwise, were to be the ‘light horse,’ 
capable of going anywhere at a moment’s notice.” 185 The cen¬ 
tral idea was that a perpetual warfare was to be waged, in which 
success could be attained only through implicit obedience to 
orders. These are the founder’s instructions to his followers: 
“To those who ask us what we are, we will reply, we are the Sol¬ 
diers of the Holy Church, and we form the Society of Jesus.’ ” 186 
We have not time to trace the later history of the Jesuits. Suf¬ 
fice it to say that they were the chief strength of the Catholic 
church when wounded so sorely by the Protestant Reformation, 
and that Jesuit missionaries have circled the globe in their zeal. 
Witness their early efforts in Japan. Or read once more Park- 

181 L,arned: A Study of Greatness in Men, 139. 

182 Cambridge Modern History , II, 33. 

1S3 Encyc. Brit. XIII, 653. 

18 -Cambridge Modern History, II, 653-4. 

185 Encyc. Brit. XIII, 646. 

186 Daurignac: History of the Society of Jesus, I, 11-12; quo. in Thompson: 
In the Footprints of the Jesuits, 44. 


45 


man’s fascinating volume on The Jesuits in North America. 
They have indeed been singularly faithful to their mission to be 
a mobile ecclesiastical soldiery. 

Twenty years ago the Boys’ Brigade movement swept over 
the Christian world. In George Adam Smith’s Life of Henry 
Drummond we find an admirable and fascinating explanation of 
the “B. B.” idea, in Drummond’s own words. The movement 
avowedly was religious. It aimed at getting some religion into 
youngsters while they were at “Tenshun !” 187 But the Boys’ 
Brigade wave receded. 

Those who enlisted in Tauler’s “Friends of God” and Zin- 
zendorf’s “Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed” were deter¬ 
mined to “live the life” at whatever hurt to themselves. 189 The 
itinerancy of Wesleyanism and Methodism is at least semi-mili¬ 
tary. And the Salvation Army and Volunteers of America not 
only have organized themselves on a military basis, but, to keep 
the thought always before their members and the public, have 
adopted a military plan of organization, and even the uniforms 
and brass bands of soldierdom. 

I should like to refer to an institution which, if not relig¬ 
ious, at least had the spirit which is at the core of vital religion. 
I refer to Bushido, “the Soul of Japan,” as Dr. Nitobe calls it. 
It was a system of chivalry of a very high order. The word 
Bushido literally means Military-KnighTWays, or Precepts of 
Knighthood, the noblesse oblige of the Samurai or warrior 
class. 190 The world never has seen anything finer, in the way of 
a nationalized chivalry, than the rectitude, courage, benevolence, 
politeness, veracity, honor, self-control and self-sacrifice of the 
Samurai. One of the most fascinating little books of our genera¬ 
tion is Dr. Nitobe’s Bushido. 

So altogether thrilling is the story of this now vanishing 
oriental system, so uniquely admirable is its spirit, that a brilliant 
Englishman has held up the ideal of an order of the Samurai 
among western peoples. This idea is the child of the brain of 
H. G. Wells, who expounds his plan in his Anticipations, Man¬ 
kind in the Making, Modern Utopia, and his First and Last 
Things ™ 1 The romantic scheme implies a voluntary nobility for 

m George Adam Smith: Life of Henry Drummond. 

issjjrnest Thompson Seaton: Boy Scouts of America, 13. 

189 Lives of Leaders of the Church Universal, I, 221-3, II, 475. 

10O See Nitobe: Bushido, 4. 

101 See Wells: First and Last Things, 173-186. 


46 


the practice of clean, resolute, self-mastered living. The plan is 
not the formal organization of a society within society, but rather 
as “an ideal of attitude.” 192 

A most interesting attempt at soldierly living and the attain¬ 
ment of real results is the “Brotherhood of the Kingdom,” a 
group of earnest religious workers banded together to help to 
establish a righteous society at whatever cost to themselves. 
Such men as Leighton Williams, and the choice kindred souls 
grouped with him, conceived such a movement and selected the 
name. Their piety is a most refreshing and prophetic type of 
Christian militancy. 

Thus we see that, all down through the centuries, in dif¬ 
ferent countries and different sects, the idea of spiritual soldier¬ 
ship again and again reasserts itself. Sometimes, as we have 
seen, it miscarries in crude, blind blood-spilling. Sometimes it 
gets down to the real thing. But, back of error or clearness of 
vision, lies the universal feeling that, in loyalty to his ideal, the 
religionist should be as rigidly self-unsparing as the soldier. 
And this feeling should, and probably will, find new and better 
exemplification as the centuries roll by. 

II. The higher soldiership in poetry. 

If an age has any true prophets, some of them will be found 
among the poets. What say the poets concerning the higher 
soldiership ? 

In Tennyson’s Holy Grail is a description of the symbolic 
sculpture round the Hall of Merlin, summarizing the develop¬ 
ment of man: 

“In the lowest beasts are slaying men, 

And in the second men are slaying beasts; 

And on the third are warriors, perfect men, 

And on the fourth men with growing wings.” 193 

I like to interpret in a spiritual sense the words which 
Browning puts upon the lips of Strafford: 

“I want a little strife: real strife; 

This petty palace-warfare does me harm, 

I shall be better, fairly out of it. 

• ••••••• 

I have a foe 


1B2 The same, 186. 

103 Tennyson: Holy Grail; see Masterman: Tennyson as a Religious Teacher, 
114, 175. 


47 


To close with, and a fight to fight at last 
Worthy of my soul !” 194 

Longfellow, in his Psalm of Life, exhorts us, 

“In the world’s broad field of battle, 

In the bivouac of life 
Be not like dumb driven cattle, 

Be a hero in the strife .” 195 

Whittier’s Moral Warfare is a stirring bugle note for the 

times: j ; 

■■ * -* 

“Our fathers to their graves have gone, 

Their strife is past,—their triumph won; 

But sterner trials wait the race 
Which rises in their honored place,— 

A moral warfare with the crime 
And folly of an evil time .” 196 

Whitman again and again trumpets forth the same call to 
the higher soldiership. Listen to his words: 

“As I pondered in silence, 

Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long, 

A Phantom arose before me, with distrustful aspect, 

Terrible in beauty, age, and power, 

The genius of poets of old lands, 

As to me directing like flame its eyes, 

With finger pointing to many immortal songs, 

And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said; 

Know’st thou not, there is but one theme for ever enduring bards? 
And that is the theme of war , the fortune of battles, 

The making of perfect soldiers? 

Be it so, then I answered, 

I too, haughty Shade, also sing war—and a longer and greater 
one than any, 

Waged in my book with varying fortune—with flight, advance, 
and retreat—victory deferr'd and wavering, 

{Yet, methinks, certain, or as good as certain , at the last )— The 
Held of the world; 

For life and death—for the Body, and for the eternal Soul, 
Lo! I too am come, chanting the chant of battles, 

m Browning: Works, Camberwell edition, II, 37, 40. 
lt)5 IyOngfellow: Psalm of Life. 
laowhittier: The Moral Warfare. 


48 


I, above all, promote brave soldiers .” 197 
And again he sings: 

“I am myself the real soldier; 

It is not he, there, with the bayonet, and not the red-striped artil¬ 
leryman .” 198 

And this is the way he sings his Adieu to a Soldier : 

“Adieu, O soldier! 

You of the rapid campaigning, (which we shared) 

The rapid march, the life of the camp, 

The hot contention of opposing fronts—the long manoeuver, 
Red battles with their slaughter,—the stimulus—the strong, ter¬ 
rific game, 

Spell of all brave and manly hearts—the trains of Time through 
you, and like of you, all fill’d 
With war, and war’s expression. 

“Adieu, dear comrade! 

Your mission is fulfill’d—but I, more warlike, 

Myself, and this contentious soul of mine, 

Still on our own campaigning bound, 

Through untried roads, with ambushes, opponents lined, 
Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis—often baffled, 
Here marching, ever marching on, a war fight out—aye here, 

To fiercer, weightier battles give expression .” 199 

Equally challenging is Ernest Crosby’s Democracy. 

“Clear the field for the grand tournament of the nations— 

The struggle to think the best thought and to express it in tone 
and colour and form and word,— 

The struggle to do the greatest deeds and lead the noblest and 
most useful lives,— 

The struggle to see clearest and know truest and love strongest. 
Your other blood and bludgeon contests but postpone the real 
fray. 

The true knights are yearning to enter the lists, and you block 
the high festival with your brawling. 

Is it possible that you mistake this horse-play for the real event 
of history? 

187 Whit man : As I Ponder’d in Silence, see Leaves of Grass, 11-12. 
i98Whitman: Leaves of Grass, 180. 

loeWhitman: Adieu to a Soldier, in Marches Now the War Is Over, see Leaves 
of Grass, 314. 


49 


Away with all your brutal disorder, and clear the field for the 
tournament of Man .” 200 

So much for the seers, the dreamers, if you wish to call 
them dreamers. 

12. The prophecy of science. 

Turning now from devotional writers, hymnists, crusaders, 
knights and poets, let us ask the level-headed men of science what 
opinion science holds concerning a higher warfare. The scientists 
are very valuable witnesses indeed. They live close to reality, 
ever in search of facts. Though they sometimes misinterpret 
their data, they are ever ready to revise their opinions when an 
error is pointed out. What have the scientists to say relative to 
this idea of substituting a higher warfare for physical and mili¬ 
tary strife? 

First, I wish to examine at some length, the views advanced 
by Professor John Fiske. Fiske was not a scientist in the sense 
of devoting his life to biology or geology. But he used the data 
dug out by scientific specialists and interpreted them as a philoso¬ 
pher of scientific habits of thought. In his Cosmic Philosophy, 
and his Excursions of an Evolutionist, in various passages, he 
touches upon the subject of war and struggle . 201 But it is in his 
Studies of Religion that he most fully sets forth his views on this 
subject. Early in this volume he shows why there never will be 
on earth a higher creature than man . 202 But we must have his 
own words: “At length there came a wonderful moment—silent 
and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great revolutions. 
Silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh 
like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment 
at which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical 
changes to the brute ancestor of Man. . . . Henceforth the life 
of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily 
life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that, in 
this direction at least, the process of zoological change had come 
to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its 
place .” 203 Thus the Human Soul, “that last consummate speci¬ 
men of God’s handiwork,” is the goal of evolution “in all the 

^Ernest Crosby: Democracy, in his Broadcast, 12. 

^Fiske: Cosmic Philosophy, III, 298, 371; Excursions of an Evolutionist. 

202-3. 

202 Fiske: Studies in Religion, 15. 

®° 3 The same, 16-18. 


5o 


deadly struggle for existence which has raged throughout count¬ 
less aeons of time .” 204 

Very slow and painful were the steps by which man climbed 
up even to his present attainment in spiritual goodness. Says 
Fiske: “In respect of belligerency the earliest men were doubt¬ 
less no better than brutes. They were simply the most crafty and 
formidable among brutes. . . . Struggle for existence . . . 
meant everlasting slaughter, and the fiercest races of fighters 
would be just the ones to survive and perpetuate their kind. 
Those most successful primitive men, from whom civilized peo¬ 
ples are descended, must have excelled in treachery and cruelty. 

. . . That moral sense which makes it seem wicked to steal and 
murder was scarcely more developed in them than in tigers and 
wolves .” 205 But the struggle to throw off the brute inheritance 
goes on. Physical strife, little by little, yields place to a higher 
form of struggle, so that we are far enough along, in scientific 
observation, to be able to see that gradually physical strife is to 
be superseded by a higher warfare. To continue in Fiske’s words 
again : “It means the throwing off the brute inheritance,—gradu¬ 
ally throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by 
to make struggle needless. Man is slowly passing from a primi¬ 
tive social state in which he is little better than a brute, toward 
an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become 
so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. 
The ape and tiger in human nature will become extinct. . . . 
Fresh value is thus added to human life. The modern prophet, 
employing the methods of science, may again proclaim that the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand. ... As regards the significance 
of Man’s position in the universe, this gradual elimination of 
strife is a fact of utterly unparalleled grandeur. Words cannot 
do justice to such a fact. It means that the wholesale destruction 
of life, which has heretofore characterized evolution ever since 
life began, and through which the higher forms of organic exist¬ 
ence have been produced, must presently come to an end in the 
case of the chief of God’s creatures. It means that the universal 
struggle for existence, having succeeded in bringing forth that 
consummate product of creative energy, the Human Soul, has 
done its work and will presently cease. In the lower regions of 
organic life it must go on, but as a determining factor in the 

^The same, 19-20. 

^The same, 53-4. 


highest work of evolution it will disappear .” 206 Professor Fiske 
summarizes his argument thus: “Whereas the earlier stages of 
human progress have been characterized by a struggle for exist¬ 
ence like that through which all lower forms of life have been 
developed, nevertheless the action of natural selection upon Man 
is coming to an end, and his future development will be accom¬ 
plished through the direct adaptation of his wonderfully plastic 
intelligence to the circumstances in which it is placed. Hence it 
appears that war and all forms of strife, having ceased to dis¬ 
charge their normal function, and having thus become unneces¬ 
sary, will slowly die out; that the feelings and habits adapted 
to ages of strife will ultimately perish from disuse; and that a 
stage of civilization will be reached in which human sympathy 
will be all in all .” 207 

We shall have time to examine the testimony of but one 
other writer on this subject—Henry Drummond, scientist, seer. 
Drummond follows in the path of Fiske. Speaking of the immense 
distance man has come, Professor Drummond says: “Between 
the early cell and the formed body, the ordinary observer sees 
the uneventful passage of perhaps some score of months. But the 
evolutionist sees concentrated into these few months the labor 
and the progress of incalculable ages. Here before him is the 
entire stretch of time since life first dawned upon the earth; and 
as he watches the nascent organism climbing up to its maturity 
he witnesses a spectacle which for strangeness and majesty stands 
alone in the field of biological research. . . . What he sees is a 
succession of animal forms, of strange inhuman creatures emerg¬ 
ing from a crowd of still stranger and still more inhuman crea¬ 
tures—a vast procession of lower forms of life. . . . The same 
process of development which once took thousands of years for 
their consummation are here condensed, foreshortened, concen¬ 
trated into the space of months. Nature husbands all its gains. 
A momentum won is never lost .” 208 

Drummond, like Fiske, notes the arrest of the animal body 
in man, saying: “Anatomy places Man at the head of all other 
animals that were ever made; but what is infinitely more 
instructive, with him the series comes to an end. Man is not 
only the highest branch, but the highest possible branch.” (He 

206 The same, 67, 72. 

207 The same, 207-8. 

208 Drummond: Evolution of Man, 78-81. 


52 


then scientifically and technically shows why this must be so .) 209 
He next goes somewhat into detail in these words: “Nature is 
not an interminable succession. It is not always a becoming. 
Sometimes things arrive.” (Drummond gives a most interesting 
list of divergent forms which have run out the length of their 
tether and can go no further.) . . . “Now the most certain of 
all these ‘terminal points’ in the evolution of Creation is the body 
of Man. . . . The physical tree of life has here run out. . . . 
In Man ... we are confronted with a stupendous crisis in 
Nature—the arrest of the animal .” 210 Thus Nature does make 
leaps, from lower to higher , 211 but Nature “seldom parts with any 
structure she has ever taken the trouble to make. She changes 
it into something else. She rarely also makes anything new. 
Her method of creation is to adapt something old .” 212 Hence 
Drummond concludes that “the animal struggle for life must pass 
away. And under the stimulus of ideals man will continually 
press upwards, and find his further evolution in forms of moral, 
social, and spiritual antagonism .” 213 

We may sum up the testimony of science in a few brief 
sentences. Organic life has climbed, step by step, from the 
lowest forms of life, higher and higher, up to more and more 
refined organisms, lower organs giving place to more complex and 
higher ones, until, at last, man is reached. At this point physical 
evolution seems to have reached its goal. But, this attained, a 
new goal is set. Intellectual and moral purposes now come into 
view, and we perceive that the universe exists not for physical 
ends so much as for moral ones. The physical is but the husk, 
which ensheathes the spiritual. When the fruit is fully formed 
and ripened, the husk falls away, having fulfilled its function. 
May we not hope, therefore, in this day when nations are set¬ 
tling their disputes in an international court, that all this great, 
all-consuming, material system of militarism may soon give place 
to a warfare more rational, more righteous, more humane, and in 
every way worthier of men in an economic, industrial, socialized, 
democratic and ethical age? The scientist’s answer to the ques¬ 
tion as to what shall be done with the war spirit of the world, 
therefore, is to help on evolution, carrying the race up to higher 

2° 8 The same, 117 ff. 

210 The same, 114-122. 

211 The same, 152. 

212 The same, 138-9. 

213 The same, 178. 


53 


and nobler things. Hence it is not alone humanitarian, but strictly 
scientific, to suggest that the time has come for men to give them¬ 
selves to a higher soldiership. 

V—FIGHTING LIKE A GOD. 

i. The new soldiery. 

When the Chicago Peace Congress of 1909 was being organ¬ 
ized, a prominent young business man was urged to serve on one 
of the committees. After the duties had been explained to him 
he said, with twinkling eyes, ( T understand, then, that what you 
want of me is to ‘fight like the devil’ for peace.” “That’s just 
it,” said the organizer. But that isn't just it. To fight like a 
devil for peace means to smite and smash all other things, to 
“make a desert and call that peace.” But how different is the 
true peacemaking! “My peace I give unto you . . . not as the 
world gives, give I unto you.” 214 Jesus’ idea of peace was the 
peace of justice, of kindness, of right relations, of loyalty to one’s 
moral ideal. To help to realize such a state of society he was 
willing to face Calvary. How different is the method, how dif¬ 
ferent the spirit! The world has had enough of “fighting like 
the devil.” It is time to fight like a god. 

Have we not discovered, therefore, a solution of the prob¬ 
lem with which we started—Given a world of fighting nations, 
how can a universe which evolves such a state of society be jus¬ 
tified, or to what higher use shall we put all this fighting spirit? 
In place of “soft carpet-knights, all scenting musk and amber,” 215 
and in place of a parasitic, embruted soldiery, consuming the 
resources and corrupting the morals of mankind, we shall some 
day see a higher soldiership. 

Then shall prevail that higher courage in comparison with 
which the man-slaying heroism will look cheap and vulgar and 
unnecessary. Dr. Nitobe tells us that by the Samurai “courage 
was scarcely deemed worthy to be counted among virtues, unless 
it was exercised in the cause of Righteousness. . . . To run all 
kinds of hazards, to jeopard one’s self, to rush into the jaws of 
death—these are too often identified with valour, and in the pro¬ 
fession of arms such rashness of conduct—what Shakespeare 
calls Valour misbegot’—is unjustly applauded. Death for a cause 
unworthy of dying for, was called a ‘dog’s death.’ . . . For a 

»*John 14:27. 

216 Du Bartas. 


54 


true Samurai to hasten death or to court it, was alike coward¬ 
ice.” 210 Little by little, men are comnig to appreciate the higher 
courage. 

2. The Good fight. 

In place of the old crusades, with their noise and tinsel and 
thin veneer of animal valor, prosecuted by self-seeking men burn¬ 
ing with a thirst for glory, 217 in place of crusades waged to place 
Palestine under so-called “Christian” banners, we shall see real 
crusading—a crusading to make every land holy, every law just, 
human society what it ought to be. The passion of the new cru¬ 
sade is the passion to serve and help and construct and to organ¬ 
ize justice. Not with the blare of trumpets and the roll of throb¬ 
bing drums—“those clamorous harbingers of blood and death”— 
but quietly, earnestly, and with an unfearing and unfaltering self¬ 
devotedness to real things, shall the new warfare be waged. 

“Every free and generous spirit ought to be born a Knight,” 
exclaimed Milton. 218 In the ranks of the new soldiery there will 
be no place for cowards or noisy braggarts, no place for “molly¬ 
coddles” or brute bullies. The knight of the new chivalry will 
“choose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to 
enjoy the pleasures of sin.” 219 While, like Chaucer’s Knight, he 
will be “a veray parfit gentil knight,” at the same time he will 
approximate to the type of Judge William Jay, whom his class¬ 
mate and intimate friend, Fenimore Cooper, addressed 
as “Thou most pugnacious man of peace.” 220 He will learn what 
Fenelon vainly attempted to teach the young Duke of Burgundy, 
namely, to be “a son of valor and to fight the battles of the 
Lord.” 221 So, when once the war spirit finds widsepread incarna¬ 
tion in chivalrous, serviceable lives, then shall men enlist, like 
Heine, in “the army for the liberation of humanity;” and find, 
with General Armstrong, that it is “jolly to be a mounted soldier 
in the army of the Lord;” 222 or, with Dr. Grenfell, who braves 
Arctic dangers to carry healing to aching bodies and souls, that it 
is “jolly good fun.” Indeed I suspect that there is so much of 
the divine in man that no joy but “the joy of the cross” is big 
enough to satisfy a normal human soul. 

^Nitobe: Bushido, 29-30, 123. 

217 Compare Hallam: Middle Ages, II, 577, 578, 681. 

^See Briggs: Routine and Ideals, 200. 

210 Hebrews, 11:25. 

220 Tuckerman: William Jay, 3. 

221 St. Gyres: Fenelon, 71. 

222 Talbot: Samuel Chapman Armstrong, 223. 


55 


APR 10 1912 


Therefore, henceforth, since fight we probably shall, it 
behooves us to “fight the good fight,” and to “live the life,” at 
whatever cost to ourselves. With such a religious equivalent of 
war once accepted, our fighting instinct will find an abundant and 
worthy outlet. While we may not aspire to “an austere military 
piety,” 223 we shall be ambitious to deserve Tertullian’s encomium, 
“O Soldier glorious in God!” 224 Preserving the record of the 
brave of all past ages, and thanking God for the stout-souled 
heroes who have counted not their lives dear unto themselves, 225 
we shall gather up and treasure all this precious legacy of inspir¬ 
ing example, and strive to emulate it, by dedicating ourselves to 
the higher soldiership and the good fight. As John Finley sings: 

“Soon, soon will pass the last gray pilgrim through, 

Of that thin line in surplices of blue; 

Winding as some tired stream asea; 

Soon, soon will sound upon our listening ears, 

His last song’s quaver as he disappears 
Beyond our answering litany; 

And soon the faint antiphonal refrain 
Which memory repeats in sweetened strain, 

Will come as from some far cloud shore; 

Then for a space the hush of unspoke prayer, 

And we who’ve knelt shall rise with heart to dare 
The thing in Peace they sang in war .” 229 

223 St. Cyres: Fenelon, 3. 

224 Tertullian: Soldier’s Crown; see Grotius: Rights of War and Peace, 60. 

225 Acts 20:24. 

lon-r 2 o? resident J° hn H - Finley, in Proceedings of New York Peace Congress, 


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